I love the Intel NUC.

Since I am considering to upgrade my home server (Windows Server) hardware, I am finally considering the following combination:

NUC (i5, USB3, Gen 4)+ Drobo 5D connected via USB3 (+ Windows Server 2012).

OS would be in an internal mSATA drive. Drobo would be the main storage unit, hosting program files, user profiles, data, of course, websites, media servers, and more.

I am not sure how the USB3-attached Drobo would work in this context. What is your take, guys? Theoretical USB3 performance would be satisfactory, but will USB3 deliver what it promises?

Sadly, there's no NUC with both Ethernet and Thunderbolt.

I have a Drobo S hooked up via USB 3.0. While it's leaps and bounds faster than my previous Gen 2 Drobo over FW800, the Drobo isn't going to saturate the USB 3.0 interface. Not even close. I would never host a VM on a Drobo, that's for sure.

I'm sure there are benchmarks available somewhere, but I can do some unscientific testing if you want.

Thanks Rob!
Is your Drobo S supposed to be slower than current Drobo 5D?

Now, I am not using any VM on my home server, but I did in the past, for various reasons. I'd be unhappy if I could not do that again should I need/want to.

Also, I am not sure how WinServer2012 would behave with system directories over USB3.

I really don't know the internal workings of the Drobo S vs. 5D. I would assume the 5D has a faster CPU and that's really what causes the bottleneck in the Drobo units.

You may be able to run a VM off a 5D without wanting to pull your hair out. I'm mostly speaking from experience of trying to do the same on a Drobo Pro with 1Gbps iSCSI connection. It was insanely slow. My Drobo S is only one generation newer than the Drobo Pro. While it's definitely a lot faster feeling, I still wouldn't want to run a VM from it unless it was something I needed to do only on rare occasions.

Thanks Rob, real life experience is really useful.

Benchmarks I am reading are not too comforting.
For example: http://www.storagereview.com/drobo_5d_review

The thing is, with a NUC being the brain of the system, a Drobo (or any competitior) would not be just storage, but also host part of the system files. Not much because of storage size (mSATA these days are up to 250GB at relatively low price), but because I'd definitely want to have them on a hardware-redundant storage.

If there is a NUC available with Thunderbolt, I would suggest looking at the Promise Pegasus. We have the 4-bay version in the office hooked up to a Mac Mini. We virtualize a Windows Server 2003 AD controller/file server and Terminal Services box (2 VMs total) on this machine. The VMs and their storage are hosted on the Promise box. The internal storage of the Mac Mini really does nothing but contain OS X. With the Mini's internal storage being composed of laptop drives in a RAID 0 array, I would assume the Promise has faster throughput. But I really have no evidence to back up that statement. All I know is that the Quad i7 Mac Mini running Parallels Server VMs over Thunderbolt is faster, quieter, and more reliable than the physical machines it replaced.

The great thing about the Drobo is the ability to mix and match drives. The Drobo S I have at home started with (5) 1.5TB drives. Then over time it switched to all 3TB drives, and now three of those are 4TB drives. Increasing storage space without having to rebuild the array is really convenient and it actually works these days. If I need more storage at work, I would have to offload the data from the Promise, rebuild the array, then load it back on just like any other RAID 5 setup.

Are you planning on using basic Windows Server, or the Windows Storage Server?

A different approach worth considering would be Storage Server, utilize the Storage Spaces. This gets you redundancy just from a dumb JBOD enclosure. Skipping something like a Drobo.

I do see NUC units out there with Thunderbolt, and I believe I've seen JBOD enclosures for it. Or you could use a Thunderbolt to eSATA adapter to use the common JBOD eSATA enclosures.

My apologies for veering off-topic here, but Rob, do you like the Drobo more than the Synology devices? They seem pretty nice, but I haven't played around with any NAS drives much.

Sorry, but I have no experience with Synology. After some rocky experiences with Drobo in the past, I was looking at alternatives. But, I always came back to Drobo for whatever reason.

The Drobo S I'm using now has been rock-solid and is fast enough for its use as massive data storage. Since it's locally attached (not a NAS), it can be backed up with Backblaze which was a requirement for me.

I could use both Windows Server flavors, in theory.
The one NUC unit with Thunderbolt is w/o ethernet port, unfortunately. I actually already have that specific NUC model in the office for a different project.
If I want Ethernet, I have to stick to USB3 storage.
One of the reasons I wanted to use Drobo is its flexibility with Drives, as Rob mentions. Synology will be just as flexible, but HDD are in a tray with screws. Unfortunately, there's no 5disk Synology with USB3 that I know of.

I am familiar with both. Synology is way more intelligent and has a better OS in every regard. There are many "Apps" availale, ranging from mail servers to CRM software, all running in the unit itself.

But, disks are in a tray with screws, which is annoying. In latest versions, it offers the same flexibility as UltraRAID or whatever Drobo calls it.

But, there's no non-NAS Synology that comes with 5 disks or larger. You have to connect it via Ethernet. WHen you see eSATA ports on Synology units, those are to connect external drives to it, not to connect the Synology unit itself to a PC.

I hope this helps.


Back to my problem, basically if I want to connect a DAS to the NUC, I have to go USB3, which basically rules out Synology. Otherwise, I'd have considered Synology instead of Drobo.

Jumping in here...

I'm replacing my 2009-era MacPro with a brand new one, and of course there's nowhere inside for hard drives. After staring at all these issues, I decided to go with the LaCie 5big. There are two variants: Thunderbolt and NAS. I went with the Thunderbolt model, which just exports five JBOD disks and leaves it to your host for RAID or whatnot. This would be perfect if only Apple supported ZFS, but they don't. Likewise, it would be great if you could buy the enclosure without disks, but they only sell the NAS variant diskless.

Anyway, I've got just shy of 2TB on my primary partition, today, so I'm going to do two different RAID stripes. 3x2TB for primary storage, and 2x2TB for Time Machine, yielding something of a sort of RAID 1+0 setup, with plenty of room for me to grow my disk usage before I have capacity issues again.

(Yes, you normally want the Time Machine partition to be bigger than what it's backing up, but I figure I want the primary partition to get the extra speedup of the third disk in the stripe. If/when 4TB becomes inadequate for the TimeMachine side, I can replace the 2TB drives with something bigger.)

What does this mean for an Intel NUC? It seems some of them have Thunderbolt and some don't. If you've got the Thunderbolt variant, you could plug that LaCie box in, run FreeBSD / FreeNAS or whatever else, and you've got five disks upon which to run ZFS. That's pretty attractive.

(For the lack of GigE, you could daisy-chain a Thunderbolt-GigE adapter -- $29 from Apple.)

Yes. As I mentioned above, the one NUC model with Thunderbolt also lacks a physical Ethernet interface.

RIght, but a $29 Thunderbolt-to-GigE adapter, attached after the Thunderbolt disk cabinet, should solve your problem handily.

Right, or, maybe less fancy, a USB3-GigE attached to the NUC itself. But I am not sure how such configuration will perform.
I usually play video content off my home server, or work on files directly on shares, while others at home do the same.

Should I trust TB/USB3-GigE adapters more?

Thunderbolt would be closer to having an onboard NIC, since it's just PCIe. Odds are, the disks will not come close to saturating the bus. There is 2 10GBit channels in Thunderbolt 1.

Right, bandwidth is not an issue on paper, but

1. Will real performances be as expected?
2. Will it be reliable?

It all depends on how good TB support is in Windows Server 2012. Which I do not know.

Resurrecting an ancient thread here.

In 2014, I mentioned that I was going with a MacPro and a LaCie 5big enclosure. Now, five years later, it's had its first failure -- the power supply for the enclosure died, making unhappy chirping noises. Of course, LaCie doesn't offer it any more and all the Google-supplied links to 3rd-party sellers like B&H Photo come up with "sorry, out of stock".

All I could find was a no-name Chinese vendor with dubious reviews. Still, better than pulling the drives and having to scramble with the pain of a forced migration, so I've ordered the no-name power supply. We'll see.

So, in those five years, Apple still hasn't released a replacement for the MacPro I'm using daily, although an optioned-up Mac Mini has basically the same specs and performance. The other change is that the world has moved to USB-C / Thunderbolt 3, and I could get all the capacity I'd ever want with a two-drive enclosure, rather than 5 drives.

Ideally, I'd migrate everything at once -- new drives, new enclosure, and new computer. But Apple's still missing in action on its replacement for the MacPro, and I'd feel dumb if I cobbled something together with what's available today when Apple might well have something attractive coming this year. (Attractive: a computer case with room inside for adding spinning disks!)

Agreement? Disagreement? Off-topic thoughts?

Modern Apple appears to have disdain for desktop computers. The Mac Mini went ages before their recent upgrade. The Pro has gone even longer (MacRumors says 1400+ days and 1800+ days, respectively).

But they have that modular system they've been talking about for a couple of years. Supposedly it's going to be done this year, but who knows? We were supposed to have that charging mat a year ago and that's just a freaking charging mat!

I would hold off, if possible...

I agree that it is incredible that they didn't manage to ship it in 2018.

However, it isn't just a charging mat. Or at least, it isn't like any of the other existing charging mats.

Existing ones charge either a single device, or multiple devices in a few pre defined spots on the mat. As such they just have dedicated charging coils for each device.

The Apple mat promises/promised the ability to just slap multiple devices down on the mat wherever you want. Presumably it uses a whole array of coils to delivery power to the spots on the mat where it was needed (which I guess will also involve detecting where the devices wanting to be charged are).

If it ever arrives I can imagine it will be eye wateringly expensive for a charging mat...

I use a MacBook Pro 15 as my main computer, which for my day to day usage is plenty fast enough. 95% of the time it has an external monitor plugged into it, though unlike most people I prefer to use the MacBook keyboard and trackpad, rather than plugging an external keyboard and pointing device into it.

I'd quite like to do more video editing and my MacBook starts to show its limits when I'm working on larger projects in Final Cut. So I'd quite like a powerful, quiet desktop Mac.

The iMacs don't appeal to me, I don't want my desktop crammed into a case that can barely cope with the heat from the CPU/GPU.

At the moment I'm hanging on to see what happens with the new MacPro. It isn't that I really expect to buy one though, I expect they are far going to be more expensive than I'd be willing to pay.

I'm waiting for it more to what GPU they put in it, so I can use that GPU in whatever hackintosh I end up building

My MacBook Pro is three years old now, I'm really hoping that I don't break it in anyway until Apple finally get round to fixing their current MacBook keyboard woes (would be lovely if they added the SD card slot back too). I don't relish losing my USB ports though, I rely on my Logitech USB mouse dongle, as Bluetooth for input devices is still terrible after all these years

They definitely did appear to have a disdain for desktop computers for a while, clearly lots of management at Apple really believed that everyone was going to switch to iPads and MacBooks.

But that very changed when they had that roundtable to tell people they hadn't forgotten about the MacPro. Since then they delivered the iMac Pro and then significantly boosted Mac Mini.

They length of time they took to update the Mini does suggest though that they didn't plan to update it but did so when they knew the new Mac Pro was taking a long time to arrive.

I wasn't really counting the iMac in my statement. They never really dropped that one like they did the others. It went to an "every other year" schedule, but that's nothing compared to the mini and the pro.

My mother, for example, still had a Dell monitor from her PC days, and she had a 2012 Mac Mini. For a couple years she's wanted to replace the Mini, but she didn't want to "upgrade" to a 2-4 year old model Mini, and she liked her monitor so it was frustrating to be told that she'd have to replace it and spend about a thousand dollars more than she wanted to.

So yes, they seem to have turned the corner on their screenless models, fortunately.

In Apple's defense, the personal computing headline across the whole industry has been the death of desktops and the sole use of laptops. But not everyone wants that. I have plenty of clients who don't want a laptop and aren't that interested in an all-in-one, or at the very least don't want to spend more than a grand for their computer. That $999 and under price tag is still very important and Apple doesn't hit that with most of their products.

Fun numbers:

Academic price on a Mac Mini with 3.2GHz six-core, 32GB RAM, 1TB SSD: $2309.
Early 2014 academic price on a six-core MacPro with similar specs: $4319 (or $4642 in inflation-adjusted dollars).

So... prices have definitely improved, but performance? Probably close to indistinguishable. But is it modular? Presumably, now that Apple has brought the Mini back from the dead, the 3rd-party ecosystem will start stamping out lots of gadgets in the same form factor so everything stacks nicely. That presumably includes eGPUs, disk enclosures, and so forth.

I've read a few articles lately about how Apple doesn't want to play nice with NVidia. We can only hope that this nonsense gets straightened out as part of the migration to eGPUs.

I guess I'm usually looking at the lowest end (where every one of my customers is happiest - usually they don't need me if they're getting a $2K computer).

Some MacPro info in here:

https://www.nytimes.com/2019/01/28/technology/iphones-apple-china-made.html