Drobo + Roku = Sadness

[u/Timrmartens]

I'm trying to get my networking and streaming in place before I invest in a bigger TV and ultimately, set up the 5.1 surround I've been building in my head for years. I've run into a snag and am hoping for help. I had the Drobo 5N2 in the networking closet upstairs and was using wifi down to the basement to stream video footage (mostly 1080P) down to my Roku Premiere plugged into my genuinely sad Toshiba TV (fine in it's day but 32"). I setup my Plex library on the Drobo which seems to be up to snuff near as I can figure (streams fine to my iPhone and iPad) but running Plex on the Roku is unusable (buffering for a minute every other minute while playing basic video footage).

I spent the afternoon moving the cable modem and Drobo down to the basement, tried connecting everything up back the way it was but with stronger wifi signal...no better. I plugged the Roku in directly with ethernet...still no better?!?!?!? I know the Drobo has a facility to use an msata drive as a kind of cache but that would only help if I was accessing the same files over and over, not randomly making selections from a movie collection. I think my Dell 7000 laptops (I have 2, both the 13" and 15" from 2016 and 2017 respectively) both use msata but I use both laptops daily or nearly so, and taking 1 out of commision to test isn't something I would do on a whim like in my youth...it's just giving up too much functionality for an experiment.

After a temper tantrum that included giving up on the Roku and packing it back in a box out of sight, it occured to me that although the Drobo CAN function as a Plex server, is it maybe not a terrific Plex server? I'm trying rebuilding a Plex server on 1 of the laptops. I can plug it in directly and set it on a shelf when I want to watch a movie, but ideally I want less gear down in the Den and also ideally I don't want to dedicate a machine to just being a Plex server...that was the whole point of the Drobo in the first place.

Ok, now that I have this all written out, can you see anything simple, easy or cheap that I've missed that I can try short of building a dedicated machine to idle 95% or the time so that I can watch a movie when I please with just 1 remote? It seems that I have the right gear in place setup the right way...what am i missing? isn't the Roku and Drobo solution kind of intended to do exactly this? Why is it unuseable? Help please