Junker's Build Thread

[tweet]

Junker,

Looking forward to reading about your system and progress. Great thread!

[junker]

The Drobo has finally arrived!

I've literally been waiting for this model since last November! This was a few months after loosing the drive in my Time Capsule. After that experience I wasn't comfortable with trusting the drive in my MacBook Air or the MacMini, so to hold me over I just purchased an external drive to back up to until the Drobo was released. As with most external drives it connects via USB 2, or the new and faster USB 3, so I went between having it connected directly to the MacMini and connecting it to the Airport Extreme. After having tried external storage both ways - connected directly to a computer vs. connected to the network router - I decided that I would be willing to forego having the maximum speed for the convenience of having the drive shared across all devices on the network.

So, the Drobo FS was what I was looking for initially but it was stocked-out with the upcoming new model... I could wait a little while, right? Well with having a back-up on the external drive everything should have been okay. Problem was, the internal 256GB SSD drive filled up with my music in no time, so I transferred my iTunes library to the external drive and selected to have iTunes use the new directory (that is now common to all of my devices). All of my music, and other media are on this one drive. Convenient, but with no back-up plan if anything happened to this drive.

So, the Drobo 5D came out first, and resolved the main issue with the older units - speed. To make it faster, they added a faster CPU, high-speed Thunderbolt and USB 3 connectivity, and even an mSATA SSD slot on the bottom of the unit which is very similar to Apple's "Fusion" drive. It is essentially a high-speed cache to speed up read performance especially as the drives spin up if they were parked in stand-by. Where this should really help is with the cover art and metadata for the iTunes library, so hopefully no waiting for the drive to come back up after some inactivity.

With these improvements the likely bottleneck is now drive IO.

But a 5D wasn't the product I was looking for. I wanted the storage available to the entire network, and I didn't want to have to leave a host computer powered up 24/7. I wanted a NAS - Network Attached Storage.

And the Drobo 5N is the new and improved Drobo NAS with all of the same improvements as the 5D, except that the high-speed cabling options have been replaced with a single high-speed gigabit ethernet. Gigabit speed has a theoretical maximum speed of 125 MB/s, but probably a bit less with real-world network overhead. The speed is pretty close to what you would see with modern, high-performance drives. Supposedly, the 5N can saturate the bandwidth gigabit wire. And with the Drobo on the network you can put it wherever you want on your network (i.e. in a closet somewhere).

So, interestingly despite all of the talk and hype regarding "the cloud" and the death of the PC, my belief is that anyone as passionate about our hobby the way we are would never trust our data offsite to anyone else. I actually take a contrarian view to this cloud computing model and would have bought a boatload of WDC stock if it already hadn't almost doubled in the past 52 weeks. I guess I'm not the only one seeing this trend...

Regarding drives... I primarily stick with Western Digital drives. Stay away from the "Green" drives. They are low-power and quiet, but they lack the firmware features needed in a reliable NAS environment. Namely, they lack TLER which basically lets the NAS computer take over if there are issues with a drive. I also believe the SMART diagnostic information is more robust, I'll find out more about this once I have a chance to install the drives into the Drobo. I recommend the "red" drives which are basically green drives with TLER and some improved RAID functionality. They should run quiet and cool. Probably the best drives to use are the Western Digital RE4 Enterprise drives. They are faster, have a much longer MTBF, but may run hot, and make more noise. And they are significantly more expensive. Still, they are my favorite, especially if I could put the Drobo somewhere where noise wouldn't be a concern. If cost was no object you could also fill the bays with SSDs for maximum performance, for low heat and noise. The mSata drive I purchased is a 128GB Crucial, and should help to narrow the performance gap to a pure SSD solution. It fits in a slick little sealed bay on the bottom of the unit.

With Drobo you can run from 2-5 drives, and add, remove, or increase the capacity of the drives as requires. With only 2 drives, the data is mirrored across both drives, so if one drive fails then there an exact copy on another drive. You also get improved read performance since data can be read from both drive concurrently. With >2 drives, each drive has both data, and "parity" data that is used to rebuild any drive that has to be removed for any reason. Drobo makes most of this very easy to use. There is a blue strip of lights across the bottom that tells you the remaining capacity. And along the right side of each drive there is a status light that indicates how full each drive it, if it has failed, and if the drive is currently being re-built (don't remove!). And if you are very concerned about having your data being safe, you can select to have it keep enough parity data to save you if 2 drives crashed, or if one of your drives had an issue while rebuilding a new or crashed drive. Double insurance for mission-critical applications (i.e. eCommerce). Also, drives tend to fail in clusters as they age...

One last thing, and this is way overkill but I have CAT7 (10 Gigabit) ethernet cable coming in to connect the Airport Extreme to: 1) the Drobo; 2) the cable modem; and 3) to the MacMini media server. It's admittedly way overkill when Cat5e or 6 would be more than enough, but it is more substantial, and everything is the right color and the proper length. It's also heavily shielded. In 10's of millions of packet I've had 0 errors and 0 packet collisions with only the typical Cat5e cable that is installed currently. At least the extra shielding should also keep other wires and devices from picking up any digital network noise.

So, wish me luck... I'm adding 2 * 3TB and a 2TB WD Red, and the 128GB mSATA, then going to format everything, and then copy everything over to the Drobo. I'll keep everyone posted on how it turns out.

[joeinid]

Junker,

I really appreciate your write up and look forward to your Drobo journey. I have been looking at that unit for the past week and almost ordered it several times. I am wrestling with my own back up and storage solution and am getting to the point where data will not fit on one single drive (4TB).

[junker]

Just installed the gold version of the HiFi-Tuning fuse into the MC452. Having the Kimber PK10 PowerKord, This seems like it could be an AC bottleneck.

The 452 is starting to sound so nice anyway, but Solti's hi-res Die Walküre is sounding particularly detailed, smooth, and refined right now.

Break-in? Fuse?

HiFi-Tuning makes 3 different types of fuses:

1. gold-plated silver
2. all silver
3. Supreme (99% silver / 1% gold amalgam)

The all silver is supposed to add some speed, dynamics, and clarity to the smoothness of the original gold, and the supreme is supposed to have advantages of both. With a digital source and a solid-state amp, gold-plated silver works for me. Especially, now that they can be found on close-out for 50% off. A $30 fuse is something that I'm willing to try.

Same ceramic, same cryo, same silver filament and solder, but with just the added layer of gold on the caps. The gold-plate may be more stable long-term then either the silver or the supreme. Don't think that 1% gold is going to prevent the 99% silver from still picking up sulfur to form H2S and tarnishing. The gold does have lower conductivity than untarnished silver, but also the surface area is >> the silver filament cross-section.

I took Dan's and the others word for it and installed with the arrow pointing toward the cap. I figure it's good enough. Sounds great right now anyway. Highly recommended $30 upgrade.

[junker]

Quick update on the Drobo. All of the album art in iTunes updates within about 1s when scrolling quickly and the stopping to let the screen populate.

I think the mSATA drive has to learn what files are being accessed the most often, so these could become even quicker.

Also, I switched to using "Jumbo Packets" by setting the MTU to 9000 on the Drobo, and on the MacMini. The setting can be found in: Control Panel -> Network -> Ethernet -> Advanced -> MTU (Custom) = "9000". At gigabit speeds this is supposed to dramatically reduce the time spent waiting - the round trip speed becomes significant at these high speeds. I've heard that with standard size packets (1500), the network is waiting about 75% of the time.

Copying a 25.72 GB Blu-Ray rip of LA Confidential to the MacMini took 256 seconds which equates to a sustained transfer rate of 80MB/s.

That's pretty close to what the WD Red drives can do at 145MB/s. Not bad... Having seen that I'd wager that the enterprise drives wouldn't offer much performance advantage with sustained transfers, but their random access with small files would probably be better with the faster spindle speed.

Next, I'd like to fill the last 2 bays with 3 TB WD Reds, let them mount and be detected as healthy, then turn on Dual Drive Redundancy (DDR) for the extra piece of mind.

[tweet]

junker...How's the new MC452 sound now that it has a few more hours on it? I hope you are enjoying it!

[junker]

Originally Posted by tweet

junker...How's the new MC452 sound now that it has a few more hours on it? I hope you are enjoying it!

Thanks for asking!

I can tell you that it is being listened to, and enjoyed greatly, everyday. Listened to 24/96 Neil Young - Harvest last night and it sounded utterly amazing. Almost lulled me to sleep I was so entranced to the good vibes...

But, I'm going to have to hold off on a review until I get my balanced cable. I had a reasonably priced Kimber XLR cable and felt that it sounded so much better than with the unbalanced Kimber that I decided to upgrade to a Kimber Select 1116.

Later, there is also a chance I'd consider a C2500 if it has the same DAC as a D100 but with an analog volume control, and the tubes. More pre-amp than I require, but the tubes are luring me with digital sources...

I'll post impressions once I get a few hours in on the new cable. Do you run yours directly into an amp, or go through a pre-amp?

[junker]

Drobo Update:

Installed 2 3TB WD Red drives so now it has (2+3+3+3+3TB). Formatted, this leaves 10TB which should hopefully last me for a while. I also have an external USB drive that I will occasionally back-up the Drobo to, and leave in another location for safekeeping should SKYNET decide my EMP my place...

[junker]

I finally worked with Nate Mansfield of Kimber to find the perfect pre-amp to amplifier interconnect to go between the D100 and the MC452. We ended up going with the Kimber Select KS1116 balanced interconnect. It's basically copper technology pushed to the limit.

Kimber Kable - KS 1116

Only the best Hyper-pure, molecularly optimized copper is used in Kimber Select KS1116. KS1116 is built by using our constrained matrix orthogonally braided geometry. Silence is the most powerful feature of this cable. The KS 1116 geometry and dielectrics drastically reduce background noise and noise floor. Lower noise floor equals increased dynamic detail. The KS1116 has a haunting presence. With no spurious noise to compete for your ears the full range of sound can be presented the same way it would naturally occur. Our ultimate goal with this no-compromise cable was to find the limits of an all copper design. Meticulously handbuilt by the same team for over 10 yrs Kimber Select represents our finest work.

I was afraid to introduce the brightness of silver to the 452 and digital sources, and the price just gets out of control... But for the same price I could have went with the standard line, all-silver KCAG, but I'm happy I went with the select. The KS1116 is very interesting in that it sounds both smooth and detailed. Now with a tube pre-amp I would consider the copper-silver hybrid cable, but there is absolutely nothing I can fault with the KS1116. Very easy on the ears. No sparkle pop here, but again top to bottom sounds great, clear and articulate with great rhythm and drive. I feel like I'm listening to a "real cable" - no artificial sweeteners, just sweet turbinado for my ears. Clearly a step-up from the unbalanced Kimber Hero with WBTs. And did I say that I <3 XLR connectors?! Also, I love the way that the tight solid copper/dielectric weave reminds me of classic cloth sheath. Very retro in a way...

Thank you Kimber!

[catmonv]

Any websites for dummies like me regarding NAS setup for starters that you can recommend?