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Drobo Announces New Thunderbolt and USB 3.0 Storage Devices

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Apr 12, 2001
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Drobo has announced a pair of Thunderbolt and USB 3.0-capable storage devices. The company has not released official pricing and availability information, other than saying they will be coming next month.

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Both the Drobo 5D and Drobo Mini include industry-first SSD acceleration--utilizing the performance benefits of solid state drives (SSDs) and the capacity benefits of hard disk drives (HDDs) to deliver an automated, no-compromise system. In addition to supporting SSDs in any of the drive bays, both units include an additional bay that will accommodate a small-form-factor SSD to achieve significant performance boosts while making all drive bays available for high-capacity HDDs.

The products also support both lightning-fast Thunderbolt (2 ports) and USB 3.0 connectivity, an industry first for storage arrays that will provide flexibility to both Mac and Windows users. The two Thunderbolt ports allow customers to easily daisy-chain devices to accommodate massive growth, and the USB 3.0 port ensures compatibility to millions of USB systems.

Along with SSD acceleration and Thunderbolt / USB 3.0 interfaces, the new Drobo products have been completely redesigned from the ground up with new hardware and software architectures. These enhancements provide a significant increase in processing capability and several optimizations to BeyondRAID(TM) that will increase baseline performance by at least five times--prior to the addition of SSDs--easily making the new Drobo 5D and Drobo Mini the fastest storage arrays in their class.
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Users interested in the Drobo 5D and Mini can sign up to be notified of availability on Drobo's website.

Article Link: Drobo Announces New Thunderbolt and USB 3.0 Storage Devices
 
Article Link
https://www.macrumors.com/2012/06/22/drobo-announces-new-thunderbolt-and-usb-3-0-storage-devices/
It's RAID for me - not looking for any proprietary stuff here, so Drobo is out.

The idea of losing a drive and having an entire cabinet's worth of drives become borked with only one place that could possibly recover them is a non-starter.

It's great that they've apparently been addressing their slow performance, but give me an enclosure with standard RAID compatibility and Thunderbolt and I'm there.
 
smithrh said:
It's RAID for me - not looking for any proprietary stuff here, so Drobo is out.

The idea of losing a drive and having an entire cabinet's worth of drives become borked with only one place that could possibly recover them is a non-starter.

It's great that they've apparently been addressing their slow performance, but give me an enclosure with standard RAID compatibility and Thunderbolt and I'm there.
Click to expand...

I don't think you understand how a drobo works, you could actually lose more than 1 drive and the only thing you would have to do is replace with new drives, the drives would integrate and rebuild the information automagically.
 
Oh, I understand how a Drobo works just fine.

That's why I'm sticking to RAID 1.
 
smithrh said:
It's RAID for me - not looking for any proprietary stuff here, so Drobo is out.

The idea of losing a drive and having an entire cabinet's worth of drives become borked with only one place that could possibly recover them is a non-starter.

It's great that they've apparently been addressing their slow performance, but give me an enclosure with standard RAID compatibility and Thunderbolt and I'm there.
Click to expand...

I used to feel like you. Then I got a Drobo. Now I've got three (2 1st gen, and 1 2nd gen) and have never looked back.

The very fact you equate Drobo with RAID tells me you know very little of the device, the company, or its products.

I have 48TB (3 x 16TB) arrays, but only about 8TB total spread across all three boxes.

When one drive fills up, I buy a larger one and slap it in.

When one drive goes bad, I replace it.

All live.

All online.

All hot-swappable.

I believe it was Mark Twain that once said "Better to keep one's mouth shut and for everyone to think you're a fool than to open it and remove all doubt."

Drobo is not RAID. It's "beyond RAID". It's what RAID would be if it was ever allowed to grow up.

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gregbenz said:
Not if the Drobo itself fails, which happens.
http://scottkelby.com/2012/im-done-with-drobo/
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Which is no different than for any DAS solution (even some SANs), RAID arrays included.
 
I spoke with a Drobo representative yesterday at an industry event where they had non-working prototypes, apparently wooden, available to touch and feel, and the units are both very nice. The mini is nice and small and the demo unit was filled with standard 2.5" HDD not SSD. As for pricing, I was told the mini was something like $350 empty, which is not bad for both Thunderbolt and for the RAID software/hardware protection.

PS, nice avatar Smithrh.
 
GEllenburg said:
I used to feel like you. Then I got a Drobo. Now I've got three (2 1st gen, and 1 2nd gen) and have never looked back.

The very fact you equate Drobo with RAID tells me you know very little of the device, the company, or its products.

I have 48TB (3 x 16TB) arrays, but only about 8TB total spread across all three boxes.

When one drive fills up, I buy a larger one and slap it in.

When one drive goes bad, I replace it.

All live.

All online.

All hot-swappable.

I believe it was Mark Twain that once said "Better to keep one's mouth shut and for everyone to think you're a fool than to open it and remove all doubt."

Drobo is not RAID. It's "beyond RAID". It's what RAID would be if it was ever allowed to grow up.

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Which is no different than for any DAS solution (even some SANs), RAID arrays included.
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What's the use of 6:1 redundancy????
 
Have they improved their transfer rate? Because previous generation ethernet capable boxes where incredibly slow.
 
smithrh said:
It's RAID for me - not looking for any proprietary stuff here, so Drobo is out.

The idea of losing a drive and having an entire cabinet's worth of drives become borked with only one place that could possibly recover them is a non-starter.

It's great that they've apparently been addressing their slow performance, but give me an enclosure with standard RAID compatibility and Thunderbolt and I'm there.
Click to expand...

If you're not replicating the data elsewhere, you're still running an enormous risk anyway.

gregbenz said:
Not if the Drobo itself fails, which happens.
http://scottkelby.com/2012/im-done-with-drobo/
Click to expand...

This can happen with any of these SOHO boxes, such as Drobo, Synology, or QNAP. The latter two are "traditional" RAID, but don't use hardware RAID, rather they use MDRAID, Linux's software RAID. If the unit dies, you had best be good at the command line in order to be able to mount the drives elsewhere.

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smithrh said:
Sure - but I'm fine with 0 at this point.

With 0, I have two identical disks. One fails, I still have another disk. That's all I need right now.
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0 is striped. You lose one, you're done.
 
polaris20 said:
0 is striped. You lose one, you're done.
Click to expand...

Oops - typo - had it right in my first post.

The data is replicated in a sufficient manner for what it is. I'm not a bank, and yes I could afford to lose it if it came to that.

I do find it extremely interesting that people zoom out of the woodwork to defend Drobo, including one member that's been on here since 2004 but with only one previous post in the last 8 years before today.

My point was, and remains, that Drobo uses proprietary methods. You run a risk with Drobo because of this. They've also had performance issues - and pricing issues as well.

Mentioning these things somehow brings the Drobo fans to a boil. Certainly glad to see Drobo improve on things but they're not for me. Nor should they be for a lot of other people once the risks are understood.
 
smithrh said:
Oops - typo - had it right in my first post.

The data is replicated in a sufficient manner for what it is. I'm not a bank, and yes I could afford to lose it if it came to that.

I do find it extremely interesting that people zoom out of the woodwork to defend Drobo, including one member that's been on here since 2004 but with only one previous post in the last 8 years before today.

My point was, and remains, that Drobo uses proprietary methods. You run a risk with Drobo because of this. They've also had performance issues - and pricing issues as well.

Mentioning these things somehow brings the Drobo fans to a boil. Certainly glad to see Drobo improve on things but they're not for me. Nor should they be for a lot of other people once the risks are understood.
Click to expand...

I've got a Drobo, but I'm not really a "fan", per se. I just use it. But it's not the central storage, and it's not the only place I've got the data. Sure, Drobo uses proprietary methods. But the data expandability, especially when it's used as a backup device, is pretty powerful. It's not as powerful as a QNAP or Synology in terms of features, and they're very expensive, but I think they're worth it. As backup data fills up from the various sources (multiple machines and server) I can expand the capacity of the Drobo. Of course, I've also got the data going off-site too, using Crashplan.

The gentleman who stores all of his data on one device, be it Drobo, Synology, Buffalo, Netgear, QNAP, etc. and doesn't have it backed up (preferably offsite as well) is pretty foolish, unless they don't care about the data.
 
Personally I wouldnt use a Drobo or other 'ready made' system as I'd rather know exactly how the system is operating.

I use an old Core2Quad server that I originally had collocated, it now sits in a standard desktop case with a RAID 10 setup, and does a nightly backup to a private RAID10 backup server I have over in the US. All data is encrypted locally and remotely, and is sent over a secure VPN.

This way you get the best of both worlds - a local backup and a remote backup that is secure.
 
From their web site:
"Drobo Mini is equipped with dual Thunderbolt ports for daisy chaining. Connect up to six Thunderbolt devices and/or a non-Thunderbolt monitor at the end of the chain"

What do they mean by a non-Thunderbolt monitor at the end of the chain?
 
smithrh said:
Nor should they be for a lot of other people once the risks are understood.
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You asked a question and there is your answer. You basically call people ignorant and never fully explain your position well. Essentially, falling back on calling people stupid at the end of every explanation shouldn't leave you surprised when they come back annoyed at you. If you genuinely are interested in that group of people it might behoove you to ask more questions so you can better understand why they like something so you can better explain why those reasons are not something you rank high in your purchasing decisions. Just a thought.

HenryAZ said:
From their web site:
"Drobo Mini is equipped with dual Thunderbolt ports for daisy chaining. Connect up to six Thunderbolt devices and/or a non-Thunderbolt monitor at the end of the chain"

What do they mean by a non-Thunderbolt monitor at the end of the chain?
Click to expand...

You can go from thunderbolt to VGA or DVI but not the other way around. Basically they're saying you can terminate the chain after six devices.
 
rmwebs said:
Personally I wouldnt use a Drobo or other 'ready made' system as I'd rather know exactly how the system is operating.

I use an old Core2Quad server that I originally had collocated, it now sits in a standard desktop case with a RAID 10 setup, and does a nightly backup to a private RAID10 backup server I have over in the US. All data is encrypted locally and remotely, and is sent over a secure VPN.

This way you get the best of both worlds - a local backup and a remote backup that is secure.
Click to expand...

My primary storage server is a Linux machine, which writes backups to both an external eSATA drive as well as the Drobo. Crashplan backs up crucial data (not stuff I can replace) to another Linux machine 50 miles away. Granted, most home users aren't going to do something like that. But it's pretty trivial these days to find something that'll back up to a cloud service as a precautionary measure. Synology will do Crashplan, QNAP does Amazon and a couple others. Drobo doesn't, and that's really it's biggest weakness; lack of applications.

I think now that everything is so digital, i.e. photos, video, music, etc. people, no matter their skill level, owe it to themselves to at least understand that data doesn't really exist until it exists in at least two places. From there they can either figure it out themselves, or at least enlist a relative or friend who does know how to get reliable backups going for them in case of emergency. No system, no matter who makes it, is infallible.
 
polaris20 said:
I think now that everything is so digital, i.e. photos, video, music, etc. people, no matter their skill level, owe it to themselves to at least understand that data doesn't really exist until it exists in at least two places.
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Oh I do agree. Ideally
there would be a product that offers RAID 10 data storage, with a remote backup. Something the size of a Drobo or Netgear Stora.

Drobo isnt even designed for the home market though, so home users really need to look elsewhere for a decent home backup system.

IIRC HP did a fairly decent one running Windows Home Server however it was only RAID 1.
 
I have a Drobo S and have been perfectly happy with it. I have on-site and off-site backups of the data on it, which you should have for any data you really care about regardless of the device its on.

That said, I find Drobo draws 90% of its criticism from people who have never owned one and say they never will. There are a few vocal people who have had one fail and are pissed because they were too stupid to backup their data. But most of the actual owners are happy with them in my experience.

No storage array is a backup (none, not one you built, not one with two disk failure protection... none. An electrical surge, fire, theft, etc. can always take out the entire thing). A backup is a copy of your data that is in a physically different location.

I like the Drobo because I didn't want an array that had to be built once with all the disks that would be included in the set from the very start and in order to increase the storage pool you had to migrate the data off and start over.
 
OK, so Drobo will support USB 3 and Thunderbolt. What will it matter if it still has transfer speeds approaching 3.5" floppy speeds? They need to address the throughput of the device, the reliability of the device, and the proprietary nature of the device.
 
rmwebs said:
Oh I do agree. Ideally
there would be a product that offers RAID 10 data storage, with a remote backup. Something the size of a Drobo or Netgear Stora.

Drobo isnt even designed for the home market though, so home users really need to look elsewhere for a decent home backup system.

IIRC HP did a fairly decent one running Windows Home Server however it was only RAID 1.
Click to expand...

Synology units support RAID 1 on 2-bay units (obviously) and RAID 6 on 4-bay or more (can lose two drives before data loss). It can back up using Crashplan, which goes to either their cloud or to another computer (I send mine offsite). QNAP does RAID6 as well on 4+ units, and can upload to Amazon or Elephant Drive.

RAID 10 is nice perhaps for performance, but for data storage I'd rather rely upon RAID6.
 
I bought a cheap NAS about a year ago (D-Link DNS-320), wish I hadn't as unfortunately it is extremely slow and the fans for some reason turn on high and stay that way forever after about an hour of non-use.

My original hope was that I would use it for longer term storage that is also internet accessible, but I am thinking that a local device would be better for me as I could actually use the data directly. Also the fan issue hardly inspires any confidence.

The mini look interesting to me, as I have been looking at some of the other Thunderbolt drives available. I'll wait for the reviews though.
 
nwcs said:
OK, so Drobo will support USB 3 and Thunderbolt. What will it matter if it still has transfer speeds approaching 3.5" floppy speeds? They need to address the throughput of the device, the reliability of the device, and the proprietary nature of the device.
Click to expand...

They did. The Drobo Mini accepts an mSATA SSD for caching of data, if I'm understanding their cut sheets correctly. That improves performance a little bit, I imagine. I'm sure it still won't be what you'd expect from other vendors using more traditional MDRAID setups.
 
nwcs said:
OK, so Drobo will support USB 3 and Thunderbolt. What will it matter if it still has transfer speeds approaching 3.5" floppy speeds? They need to address the throughput of the device, the reliability of the device, and the proprietary nature of the device.
Click to expand...

Uh, did you read the post? Seriously, reread it.

Now that you have, yes they're just promises at this point but the reviews should come soon enough.
 
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