Drobo Speed and the Mac Pro

I got a Drobo a little while back. Its a pretty cool device. I have however been a bit disappointed with the speed.

Searching through the internet I read that the FW800 interface on the Mac Pro ain't that hot, and that getting a PCI-E interface would prove faster. Well after hooping in newegg.com and $40.00 later, I tested it out.

Here are the results:

As you can see there is a pretty big difference. For example, sequential read with 256K blocks was about 38MB/s with the PCI-E card while the motherboard FW800 interface was about 22MB/s.

This benchmarking was done with XBench on OSX 10.6.1 with the Drobo having 4 Seagate 1.5TB SATA 300 drives.

Now the Drobo is faster, but still not as fast as I'd expect. Given that, Its still a pretty cool device, and speed is my only complaint.