New Drobos Designed For Speed

I am a pleased Drobo customer since 2009. I have a basic, straightforward setup that has worked flawlessly for years. But… I do admit that despite its endurance, I wish my Drobo would be faster.

So what’s Drobo to do? Redesign their products emphasizing speed and performance and release the new Drobo 5D and unexpected Drobo Mini. Both of these new devices are equipped with Thunderbolt ports (two of them) and USB 3.0. Gone is Firewire. To further increase caching performance, you can add a mini-format SSD drive to ease the overhead of redundancy. While you should have your data drives on a UPS in case of power outages, both devices feature power protection with an internal battery that ensures your Drobo completes all of its saves and writes before shutdown. Yes, your data deserves that.

The Drobo 5D has space for five 3.5-in drives. From what I understand, DroboShare is not supported on this new platform (5D and Mini). But what about that Mini product? The Mini shares the same blazing architecture as the 5D but instead of using 3.5-in drives, the Mini supports up to four 2.5-in drives typically found in laptops. Can you imagine the speeds if you were to exclusively use SSDs in the Mini? But please, even though the USB 3.0 port is backwards compatible with USB 2.0, don’t connect the new speedy Drobos to this slower interface. Your sanity does not deserve that.

So if you’re in the market for a data storage refresh come this summer, consider the Drobo 5D or Mini, estimated at $850 and $650 respectively. You and your data deserve this.