Is Drobo fast enough?

Testing 3 different HD movies streaming off the Drobo at the same time via Plex media center on the Mac Mini over Firewire 800.

Category:

Entertainment

Tags:

• drobo
• mac mini
• plex
• media center
• speed
• benchmark
• ipad

[awh5017]

Curious, what speed of drives are you using?

5400 or 7200?

[Pepsiaddicto]

@awh5017 I'm using 5400 RPM drives made for media streaming by WD. They're also made to be very quiet, which is great since the Drobo is right where I do my media watching. No problem with 5400 rpm drives since there are other things that would be the bottleneck before that gets maxed out. I never hear the drives spinning at all.

[Jaymim]

Thanks for the demo. Been researching the best way forward for a home media server and your set up seems to be the optimum approach. Few questions: 1) Did you use MacTheRipper for DVD/BR rip? Does the Plex Server support DVD/BR menu features, i.e can you still navigate original options? And finally 3) When playing back high def source - music or video - is 5.1/7.1 piped ok through your receiver if available? Thanks in advance and enjoy your new rig!

[Pepsiaddicto]

@Jaymim I use Makemkv to rip the blu-ray movies, then run them through Handbrake to compress them to H.264 MKV. I don't think Plex supports menu features, but I don't think Makemkv supports it, so I've never tried it. 5.1/7.1 work fine using HDMI passthrough through my Yamaha receiver. I had it hooked up with optical originally and I had some issues getting 5.1 to work properly, but HDMI worked without a problem.

[Brian1986B]

Fantastic video ! ,exactly what i want to get the Drobo for. just a few questions - the Mac mini running Snow Leopard Server with one copy of plex on it ? serving the Macbook Pro and iPad how did you set this up ? also Macbook Pro and iPad connecting over Wifi to Mac mini yes ? is you Router able for this ?. What was the size of your video file? 4Gb or more also what format mp4 or mkv ?, sorry for all the questions im a noob !! :-) . Great setup you have.

[Pepsiaddicto]

@Brian1986B The Mac Mini is just running regular Snow Leopard. Plex runs in 2 parts. There is a Plex Server and a Plex client. The server part is running only on the Mac Mini, which is serving media off the Drobo. The iPad/iPhone Plex apps connect over a local network or the internet to a Plex server. The iPad and Macbook Pro were connecting over WiFi, yes. In order to do local network connection to the server, no router configuration was necessary. The format of all videos was H.264.

[pomeraniec]

over the firewire it's easy, tray over ethernet (cat5) you get see the problem

[robbieba]

@kevinthegenius I'll be making a video of that shortly. I tried this with a 2006 Mac Mini, and it could not handle the bit rate. I needed to upgrade it anyway so I'm in the process of putting together a drobo with actually blu ray rips. I wont downgrade quality for space

[Kortik]

is this Drobo FS or Drobo S model?

[ross123540]

I use my Drobo for Plex media server with a mac mini over firewire800, its great!

[Thunderclap23]

that was a great video. great benchmark and very informative.

[11m4357r0]

Biggest problem with your setup is the Mac's.... Nuffsaid.

[Graphicshiv]

Hey thanks for your video greatly appreciate it ......exactly what I was looking for....

one question though whats the write speed on it like ? ... if i wanted to use it for editing 1080-50p video footage ? do you think it would be able to handle the read/write while being able to skim through the data ?

thanks in advance.

[sailomb]

Thanks for this video of the drobo as a HD media server on mac mini. This is what I was wondering myself. Looks like I'll be setting this up also. I would want to add the eyeTV HD by Elgato to watch and record TV.