The Drobo 5D is a Direct Attached Storage Device (DAS) featuring 5 drive bays (they can take up to five 3.5” SATA II/III HDD’s or SSD’s), one mSATA SSD in the Accelerator Bay (not included) and is equipped with one USB 3.0 port and two Thunderbolt connections to the host computer.  The Drobo 5D has an internal lithium ion battery to protect against power cuts and supports Drobo’s data-tiering system, this allows it to move regularly accessed data onto an optional mSATA SSD for increased read speeds.  We only had one Drobo 5D to review but you can link up to six devices which can be daisy chained together with Thunderbolt cables.

Drobo is known for bringing easy to use professional storage to the consumer market with their own BeyondRAID technology, features of this are thin provisioning, instant expansion, mixed drive size utilization, automatic protection levels, single or dual disk redundancy, virtual hot spare, data aware and drive re-ordering.  The device comes with 1 year warranty in the US or outside the EU and 2 years if you are within the EU and the dimension of the Drobo 5D are Width (150.3mm), Height (185.4mm), Depth (262.3mm) and with a weight of 3.9kg without the hard drives. 

The device comes nicely and securely packaged and within the contents there is the Drobo 5D, USB 3.0 Cable (6ft), Power Cord with Power Supply (6ft) and a Quick Start Guide.  Installing the Drobo 5D was very simple once the dashboard utility has been installed you simply connect the device via the Thunderbolt or USB and it is spotted immediately.  For this review we used a 13in MacBook Pro with a 2.3GHz Intel Core i5 and 4GB of DDR3 memory and we used progressive WD SATA drives to gage performance.  With the BeyondRAID technology thin provisioning is standard and capacity creation can be set between 1TB and 16GB during virtual volume creation and this is regardless of the number and size of physical drives.  For example we used a pair of 2TB WD SATA drives and chose a single 16TB HFS+ formatted volume, as thin provisioning allocates blocks as they are used when we added two further 3TB WD SATA drives they were each detected straight away with ease.

When testing speeds on the internal drive we were getting read and write speeds of around 78MB/Sec and through using the Thunderbolt link we noticed an increase to 194MB/Sec, another thing you notice when the device is in action is it is a bit noisy with the fan.  With an RRP of $699 this is the perfect DAS partner for both the professional or the average consumer with its easy to use technology.

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