Unfortunately, there are some real problems with your testing methods. You are copying back and forth to the internal drive of your MacBook -- that is a 2.5" drive, maybe a 5400 RPM one at that, and so it's quite likely that it is the limiting factor in your testing. I can't say why specifically that the one FW800 test is taking longer, but in general FW 800 is faster than FW 400, which is faster than USB 2.0 (which is rated at 480 Mbits/sec, but it's not REALLY a protocol that is optimized for block data transfer like Firewire is). Have a look at this test on BareFeats, for example: http://www.barefeats.com/usb2.html Which does a comparison of the SAME drive using FW800, FW400, and USB 2.0. See that FW 800 is substantially faster. The only way you can test speed is to read/write directly to the drive (you could use the UNIX 'mkfile' command, or any general writing utility -- IOZone is good for this). Copying to/from your internal drive may well just test the transfer speed of the internal drive. One other thing that's important to note -- often FW800 devices will not be faster than FW 400 devices. This is mainly because few drives themselves are fast enough to saturate the FW 400 bus, which can carry about 40 MB/sec. Today's faster drives can do 40-60 MB/sec in the right situations with the right cache for sequential transfer so they are just a bit faster than FW 400. But drives that are > 2 years old (with 2 MB caches) are typically slower. Anyway... Drobo looks like a good product, and I find it very interesting (though I just bought a ReadyNAS last week with 4x750 GB drives)... it would be nice at its price point to have a FW800 option as I'm assuming that with 3 or 4 drives in there it *should* be able to push more than the ~18-30 MB/sec that USB 2.0 can do from the platters. You're putting a 65 MPH speed limit on something that has a 350 HP motor in the chassis :-/

For you, in using a MacBook, this could indeed be something you would not notice. But that's largely because laptop drives are slow (there is only a single 7200 RPM laptop drive that I'm aware of -- it's a 100 GB drive). For people who are using desktop systems, these days they typically come with larger, faster drives that could saturate the USB 2.0 bus but likely could not saturate a FW 800 bus. For backup or archival purposes this would likely not be a problem -- but if people wanted to do video editing or something then the Drobo would probably not be an option. I've been to a number of low-budget shops where they do video editing on Macs, and they are a morass of Firewire hard drives (lots of La Cie drives). I was sorta surprised and appalled at the mess -- 30 drives, labeled, on a shelf with content that is not backed up is just asking for pain. Drobo drives could be an interesting option if they could keep up -- "keep up" really depends on content type (for example, FW 800 cannot handle uncompressed HD video -- typically Fibre Channel is necessary for that speed). Anyway might be worth people trying with the current product and seeing how it works... eventually ;-) I was testing my ReadyNAS and was able to get a sustained 30 MB/sec on reads and writes over GigE with 256 KB blocks... better than I'd expected.

The test was performed with a five month old Macbook Pro with 2.33 GHz Intel Core 2 Duo and 2 GB of RAM. The reference I made to my old G3 was when I first discovered and was "sold on" FireWire 800. The purpose of my blog was nothing so nefarious as you suggest other than to express clear surprise over the lack of speed gain for 1394b in my application, with my equipment. My comments notwithstanding, I remain a person who prefers FireWire because I have had many years of good luck with it and I have too many ancillary devices on my USB hub.

By the way, Data Robotics chose USB2.0 after a survey of about 800 people indicated it would be the interface of preference of about three-quarters of them. That said, we always intended to have a FireWire product. The only questions was which to do first because doing both would have delayed the product introduction. We chose USB2.0 first based on that research. I'm sure there will be a Drobo with FireWire in the future, but we do not have a release date for that product as of yet.

It is what it is, for now. There are NAS alternatives as I'm sure you're aware -- look at the Drobo forums for a discussion of them. Also, there is the option of connecting the Drobo to an Airport Extreme and using its disk sharing.

There are plenty of network attached USB hubs out there.  Turning the Drobo into a NAS is a simple affair.

As for >2TB partitions...  Well, they would be nice, but at the moment, this is the price you pay...  I am not sure of the technicalities, but I am sure there is a reason...  Isn't there?

Ok, so yeah, what is the reason?  Why can't the drive just redeclair its new capacity?  I mean...  I don't know...  Yeah,...  The 2TB thing is a pain...  But really excited about this product.  Getting one soon... 

This thread is now quite old, but like you I've been an Apple enthusiast for as long as I can remember. I've used FireWire, well before it become available as a standard option on Pro machines and now use FireWire 800 (IEEE1394b) extensively. I agree with you that the use of FireWire 800 for trivial tasks such as those described above, especially with your hardware (ie consumer level & laptop based machines) shows little to no benefit, but on Pro machines or even the new Ali iMacs which come bundled with these interfaces, the use of FireWire 800 with the appropriate hardware reaps a huge benefit. My setup includes the use of an external RAID device where I strip across 4 disks. Without the use of FireWire 800, I would see very little benefit striping my data. I don't regularly copy a 5.42GB folder from an internal to an external drive, nor do I think it's a good test of the interface, but I do transfer this amount and more of data through the use of virtualisation and video feeds in a much shorter timeframe. Without the use of FireWire 800, this would be impossible.