Drobo Energy Usage

I bought a Drobo a short while ago, along with a DroboShare and two terabyte disks. A few of my friends and colleagues with similar storage needs were curious about the Drobo, and specifically it’s power usage. I used a simple plug-based energy monitor to measure the watts consumed under a few scenarios.

My setup is as follows:

	- Drobo base unit;
	- DroboShare NAS;
	- Two one-terrabyte Western Digital [WD10EADS Caviar Green](http://www.wdc.com/en/products/Products.asp?DriveID=559) Disks.

Here’s the stats: |Activity |Power Draw (Watts) | Idle (with fans spun down) | 15—17 | Streaming MP3s over network | 22—26 | Streaming film over network | 25—30 | Writing data from network | 26—27, with occasional spikes to 30

Overall, these numbers don’t seem too bad, considering the DroboShare is a little solid state Linux box. I would’ve liked to have seen a lower idle number, the value in the table above is the lowest I saw during the week I used the energy monitor. Obviously, take these numbers with a pinch of salt, they are my anecdotal tests.