- Easy to expaand
- Tool-less design
- Great read/write speeds
- Expensive
- Thunderbolt cable not included
Final Thoughts
I love using my Drobo 5D. The idea that the unit grows with me when I need more space is great, especially since I don’t need to do anything except add/swap drives. I am sure dealing with a drive failure is fairly straight-forward but I do not want to experience it.. yet or ever if possible (wishful thinking right?).
Setup was simple. Follow their online setup wizard, slide the drives in, power up the unit and sit back and wait a little bit. I’m sure migrating from an old Drobo to a new one would be a bit more involved but initial setup was a breeze.
The price for a Drobo 5D might be a bit steep for the average consumer, especially since you have to buy drives separately from the unit itself. The Drobo 5D can go for as little as $650 CDN (about $500 US). When coupled with five 4 TB Seagate hard drives, that would push the price up to about $1,350. For a small to medium business though, the investment in a Drobo for their digital work would be a no-brainier, especially when you want to minimize any downtime due to hardware issues or drive failures.
The USB 3.0 or even Thunderbolt speeds provide me with enough read/write bandwidth to work right off the drive. The updated Drobo 5D3 with its USB 3.1 and Thunderbolt 3 would allow those who edit digital videos even more bandwidth to work directly off of.
A neat feature I did not know about until I dug in a bit more was the power supply that comes with the Drobo 5D. In the event of a power outage, there is enough power for the Drobo to spin down the hard drives and shutdown to minimize any data corruption or failure due to a built-in, internal backup battery. You should probably still have your external hard drives and computers on a UPS battery backup, but it is still a really nice feature to have out of the box.
Down sides? I would have to really think about it. Perhaps being able to configure either the Drobo unit as a JBOD (just a bunch of disks) or perhaps split the drives into groups or perhaps configure drives 1 and 2 to be mapped as one drive, then drive 3 can fill in there or drive 3 and 4 can fill in. I guess that makes it more of a RAID enclosure whereas Drobo wants to keep it simplified for the end user. But as it it works really well.
If you are in the market for a data storage device that easily grows as your data needs grow, then I would highly recommend checking out what the Drobo product line has to offer.