For a couple of months now I have been frustrated by slow performance copying from my Drobo-FS NAS.
Transfers were happing at about 100mbps maximum. Two other friends with Drobo-FS units were also reporting the same problem so had we accepted that slow transfer speeds. After a copying session and being once again annoyed by the performance I realised that we were all using FritzBox (highly recommended) ADSL routers.
Searching for FritzBox performance issues I managed to find an blog post Kelvyn Taylor by that identified the the problem to be actually related to the Fritzbox ADSL router, not the Drobo!
If the Drobo-FS is connected to any port other than LAN1 the ports will be in "Green" mode and not negotiate at higher speeds to save power. You can make these changes in the FritzBox configuration in the Energy Monitor settings.
Performance has now gone from 10MB/s to and acceptable 40-50MB/s.
Source: http://kelvyntaylor.blogspot.com/2011/01/beware-fritzbox-7390s-green-lan-mode.html
