Similar to its article comparing a QNAP NAS to a similarly equipped Thecus NAS, Computingondemand.com has done an article comparing the QNAP to the Drobo FS. The article compares a number of attributes of both devices and declares a winner (or tie) for each. For example, Drobo gets the nod for ease of use:
Ease of Use
QNAP enters this with a NAS that can be configured to do just about everything. Their products shouldn't really be considered Network Attached Storage, but instead should be considered Network Attached Servers. With all the things the QNAP products can do, their configuration suffers. With all the options, configuration can become difficult for the first time NAS owner. If ease of use is your gig, then Drobo is your bet.The Drobo can be unboxed and fully configured on your network in less than 15 minutes making this NAS a super hero for those without a geek degree. The Drobo dashboard has only a few options making the Drobo a snap to configure.
Winner: Drobo
And, QNAP gets the win in the performance category:
Performance
If there is one thing a NAS should do well, it is serve up your files quickly. Both the QNAP and the Drobo use either RAID or some variation of RAID. Any time you add redundancy to an array, you are going to slow things down, but this shouldn't make a huge difference when you take into account the bandwidth of your network. Typically, that will be your biggest bottleneck. If you are looking for a speed demon, Drobo will not win the race. With some of the lowest scores we've tested to date, the Drobo just can't keep up. QNAP provides the speed you need for transferring HUGE files around on your network. Both the QNAP and the Drobo can stream movies and music just fine, but if you need your files fast, QNAP is the answer.Our benchmark was transferring a 46.6GB Blu-Ray ISO (Avatar) from the Drobo FS to our workstation. We just initiated the file transfer and watched the networking tab in Windows Task Manager. We experienced around a 23 MB/s and around 78 with QNAP.
Winner: QNAP
Computingon demand compares a total of 12 categories - head on over to the article there to see the results.
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