Amazon.com: Customer reviews: Drobo 5N: Network Attached Storage - 5 Bay Array

Top positive review

Likely the most used, flexible, and reliable computer device in my household of technology...

Reviewed in the United States on August 1, 2014

My first Drobo (2nd Gen, FW800) was a love-hate relationship -- it never faltered in keeping my data safe...yet it was painfully slow.
For this reason, when it finally came time to upgrade to a different RAID box, I was hesitant to give Drobo another chance. To be honest, I had actually made up my mind not to, but after having it on sale as a "Deal of the Day", and reading reviews on how improved it was over previous generations (like my old one), I decided to give it a try.

To this day, I am kicking myself that I did not upgrade sooner. :)

Notably, this unit is (I'm sure you know) a NAS box -- it connects directly to your network. This is notable in my case because my first Drobo was not -- which meant I had to build an Atom-based server to act as a mediator between the Drobo and anything that accessed it. This was extra power used, extra money spent, and extra hassles endured.
Now with the 5N, the Atom machine isn't even hooked up at all anymore.

My Drobo gets everyday use, and it has never hiccuped at all. I use it as a media center for all my uncompressed blu-rays, which are ~20-40GB each (raw MKV's), and they all play back without a hitch. It might seem lazy to not pop in a blu-ray disc...but being able to browse and choose, on the spot, is a really nice convenience.
More importantly, I also store all of my critical work data -- literally hundreds of gigabytes worth -- on there as well, and regularly access it. And while I will never, ever trust my data to one location, machine, etc (I quarterly backup my essential data to another external drive as well, for safe-guarding), in all the years I have been a Drobo user, my confidence in their reliability has been earned and deserved.

The 5N is by no means a speed demon -- there are definitely faster units out there. However, I do not think you will find them in this price range. For the vast majority of tasks, it will still be more than fast enough to even use as a regular "work drive". Photographers regularly do this with their heavy RAW camera files, and I can do just as easily with most types of video files for editing. The only time it will falter a bit is with large image sequences -- but this is tough on almost anything.

At its highest, the unit runs at around 111-120 MB/s for me -- which is pretty darn good, considering it is limited to gigabit speeds, but it typically works much slower; those moments were the exception.
It is also worth noting that I have, indeed, installed a 128 mSATA card into the unit -- a really nice feature that I couldn't help but take advantage of...though I can't confirm how much of an every-day difference it has really provided.

One thing I will note, is that when both my buddy and I were simultaneously reading / writing to the Drobo at the same time, it did seem to bog down. To be fair though, we were doing heavy tasks involving visual effects with a lot of throughput / bandwidth, so that is understandable. I would be confident in saying that it should be able to serve a good number of people without hassle, under normal circumstances.

There are very few competing units that offer a similar feature to Drobo's "BeyondRAID" technology. A feature like this, I have found, to be invaluable...as it allows me to expand my storage as needed -- which I have done many times over the years between this unit and my last. Whenever I have done so, it is a very seamless procedure -- take out a drive (the unit will even recommend one for you), put in the new one, and it will automatically rebuild. This is obviously what is supposed to happen, but reading reviews for other units...you'd be surprised how many raid units don't perform that critical function reliably.

Notably, the unit is very smart in detecting what is going on, and if you eject a drive accidentally (for some odd reason), and put it back in, it will -- in short time -- figure out that you put back in the drive...and will quite quickly get itself back on track instead of completely rebuilding and wiping the drive. Other units will do this, but will not be nearly as fast to respond.

The unit can also be setup to email you if a drive was to fail, or if space is running extremely low. A nice feature for extra peace-of-mind.

Drobo Apps are a nice addition, though nowhere as numerous as some other competing devices. I do use the Transmission app, which is great for having the device work away with torrents while not having to keep another system on.

I really can't say enough nice things about the newer generation of Drobo machines. I have used a 4-drive "traditional" RAID 5 array before moving into Drobo territory, and not being able to expand without replacing ALL the drives just wasn't a practical solution. And, paired with the increases in performance with modern Drobo devices, there really isn't any reason to not give them a serious look.
The up-front cost isn't insignificant -- but their worth will far outweigh it in the long run.

9 people found this helpful

Top critical review

Critical reviews›

Brains Ironically

Terrible. Simply terrible. Update: Ridiculously terrible, but at least it's unreliable!

Reviewed in the United States on July 14, 2013

Latest update at the end.

*************

First unit was, literally, fubar.

Drobo was quick to replace the unit, I assume because they already knew the unit was junk before it was even shipped, and the replacement works ok -- after much tweaking and frustration.

Been using the unit for about 6-8 weeks now. Occasionally forgets settings like: workgroup name (resets to default for some reason,) mounts (for some reason one, or more, of the three virtual partitions becomes unmounted, no idea what that's about or why it does it.)

Should be interesting to see how it handles a drive failure. I'm guessing it won't be pretty (but that's pure speculation at this point.)

Update (12 October 2013)

I've had the Drobo on my network for about four months, or so, now.

My original comments on the initial experience stand.

At this point in time I've had no drive failures and the Drobo has been solid for over three months with no interaction required on my part; that includes a move to a new apartment.

Summary:

Pros: I bumped my review up from two stars to four stars due to Drobo being reasonably fast with support and very fast with replacement of the original device. Once I had it set up and worked through whatever the issue was that had the device forgetting settings, it's been solid. I haven't had to do anything at all except access the shares.

Cons: I have to agree with most other folks that the setup was kind of rough. I followed the directions as well as I was able (I'm reasonably tech-savy) and still had some issues: the first device had issues, the second was still kind of tricky to get right. Other issues are noted above. Transfer speeds to the device are pretty slow for some reason. Everything on my network is 10/100/1000 and I only get about 2MB/s xfer.

I'd probably go with another Drobo if given the need. The device does look pretty "Darth Vader-ish" which is kind of cool.

********
Update, 8/2017

The device failed completely over the last couple of days, appears it took a couple of drives with it somehow because they aren't recognized in a new device (Not a Drobo, but it can see the other drives even though the data is gone.)

First sign of trouble was that I couldn't see the device from one PC, although I could see it from other PC's and Plex could talk to it from the TV. Then none of the PC's or Plex could see the device. The device itself was showing *no signs of trouble!* (lights.)

Had to contact support because I had no idea how to access a device that wasn't there, and they wanted me to pay for support. Fair enough, but why have a "Community Support" section if I can't use that?

The final straw was that I'm completely unable to recover any data. Mostly just DVD's but also some stuff I've had for years, now gone. Some "backup" device this turned out to be.

Would have been tolerable if it had given me some indication that something was amiss, but there was nothing... just "groovy" then "kaput!"

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466 total ratings, 451 with reviews

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From the United States

The Active Geek

Likely the most used, flexible, and reliable computer device in my household of technology...

Reviewed in the United States on August 1, 2014

Verified Purchase

9 people found this helpful

Helpful

Brains Ironically

Terrible. Simply terrible. Update: Ridiculously terrible, but at least it's unreliable!

Reviewed in the United States on July 14, 2013

Verified Purchase

One person found this helpful

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Eldar Eilam

Drobo 5n - good, not best

Reviewed in the United States on April 17, 2013

Verified Purchase

I was looking for NAS to contain the growing amount of files (music, video, images) that I share between all the computers and devices in the house.
The solution should be relatively simple to work with multi-platform network (Mac, PC, tablets and iPhones) with the option to upgrade in the future with increased volume.
The focus was mainly on the ability to stream media to devices, sometimes even simultaneously. The general idea was to create a "homemade cloud" on which all the files will be located on and be accessed by anyone on the network according to their the needs.
It seemed that the Drobo 5n can meet these demands, according to the specifications and reviews I read.
The Drobo is small and elegant enough to put on one's desk. The design is clean and impressive, made mostly of metal and some relatively high quality plastic.
The Drobo contains five slots of disks allowing maximum storage capacity of 15TB(assuming that redundancy is a single disc and use disk of 4 terabytes). In addition there is room for a SSD mSATA card that I will refer to that issue later.
On the back of the chassis there's a 1GB network connection, power connection and a small operating switch. The box is pretty plain, something like Apple's products (they still have a lot to aspire to, of course) as the predominant color is black. The device itself comes wrapped in a kind of black cloth bag, if you need to mobile it. (Though, I would recommend not to, and if so - certainly not in a bag) Beyond that there is a ethernet cable (black) and a charger). There is also a piece of cardboard (beautifully designed) provided preliminary directions and voila, you're ready to go.
Warranty - has a two-year international warranty from the company and can be extended to another year for additional fee.

Assembly and initial Startup
I purchased The Drobo along with the two WD Red 3 TB NAS Hard Drive: 3.5 Inch, SATA III, 64 MB Cache - WD30EFRX (intended for storage arrays). My thought was to start with small capacity and to upgrade as the prices of the higher capacity disks drop. To my opinion such discs capacity of 4TB still not justify their price.
Physical assembly was relatively simple. Connecting the power cord and ethernet cable then just pushing the discs to their slots and you're done. Or not?...
Everything went well until the dashboard software needed to identify the Drobo. Something it refused to do for a long time.
I'll try to be brief, but after I connected each component like twenty times. I reinstalled the software on any computer I had at home, I modified the router and firewall settings I decided to just leave it and come back after 20 minutes.
Only then the dashboard recognized the Drobo. The manual says it would take five minutes, in practice it takes a lot more (As you probably know, when a new toy falls to your hand any minute something fails to work seems like eternity).
Its boot time takes longer than you'd expect and then it takes some more time to properly prepare the disks. My advice to you - prepare a good movie to see to kill the time until the device is up and ready for action.

Dashboard interface:
In the dashboard you can see all of your Drobo devices (if you have more than one connected, of course). There is a nice detail display of the device and its indications on the screen represent what appears on the device exactly.
The interface also gives a general status of the system with detailed information on each disc and its condition. There is some more information of the volume utilized, even graphically (not impressive, but nice).
There is an option to install dedicated software for the Drobo (backups, control, and streaming media) - However the selection is very poor.
Shares and permissions - you can set up folders and map them as a separate network drive. It works fine, all computers (PC and Mac) recognized the folders without any difficulty.
The permissions situation is somewhat different. Specific users can be manually set for certain folders and the rest refer to as... well, the rest.
There is, of course, one admin user need to set up which controls all settings. As far as the rest of the users and from what I could read and understand - The permissions of the Drobo are hardly usable.
System Tools - the most basic you can think of. Reset can be done remotely, turn off, reboot and software updates. That is about it. Another nice option if you like discos is flashing the lights of the Drobo for 15 minutes. This is nice once or twice to do in a dark room. Beyond that, I found no use for it.

Current use:
After setting up the whole system, I did quite a bit of experimenting with all kinds of sizes and types of files and I can tell what to expect
So here are the results:
Writing - ~70MBs.
Reading - ~90MBs.
These data transfer rates are reasonable and more or less what you might expect the Drobo and certainly much better than previous models.
As mentioned before - you can add mSATA SSD card to Drobo should improve performance.
On the Drobo website it is noted that if you add this card you can work better with Premier and aperture.
Meanwhile, from my experience without the mSATA card - when the Drobo works simultaneously with more than one computer its performance decline. How much? Let's just say that if you want to upload and download a file simultaneously from two different computers it will no longer stream media or at least make chocking noises.

Another fact worth mentioning - It's a very quiet device. It probably also related to the disks used, but its structure absorbs a most of the noise and when it's 30 cm off the table you can barely hear it humming.
Support:
Unlike some of the Drobo's competitors, the support considered to be very good. Involuntarily, I was forced to make use of the support, since I had a registry problem due to a typing error.
I received a detailed reply by mail, less than an hour after I submitted a call to the support. They also asked me to kindly confirm that the problem has been solved.

First impression and conclusions:
The Drobo fairly does what is required of it. It stores files efficiently and becomes transparent to the user which is good.
On the other hand, it does not do anything beyond what you would expect from.

Pros:
- Design
- Easy to install
- Ease of use
- Flexible RAID array
- Quiet
- Service Support

Cons:
- Very basic User Interface
- Speed under load
- Applications are limited
- Long boot time
- Unstable performance

===========================================================

Additional conclusions after two weeks of use:
There is a random drop in performance the Drobo and sometimes fails to be detected in the system and requires a reboot.
When mapping a drive on the computer is not giving the actual memory size left on the disks and need to enter the dashboard software to check the free space remaining.

30 people found this helpful

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Larry G

Fast and secure, 10TB never so easy

Reviewed in the United States on May 20, 2014

Verified Purchase

I got this 1-2 months ago and it's working great with four 3TB and one 2TB HD, for 10TB of useable storage and data protection.

I started with two 3TB and two 2TB drives but upgrading soon after was easy. Just pop in a larger drive in the 5th slot and wait for the drobo to let you know that it's all sync'd up. If you pop out a smaller drive and wait for it to sync up you can then fill that spot with another larger disk and let it all sync up again. It did the syncing while I was asleep at night and don't know how long it took. I am told that with a full drive it can take a whole day to sync up when a drive is added or removed, and with an empty drobo it might take just minutes to sync up a new drive. But only do one drive change at a time and let it sit until it is ready and protected before making another drive change!

They say you can use the drive while it initializes and sets up data protection, but I didn't. Initial setup with the mSATA was a little complicated, because tech support had to get me to "reset" the drive via the drobo software after the mSATA was installed but before installing the drives. Not sure if that "reset" is needed every time you change the mSATA. they say there is no benefit to more than 64GB in the mSATA accelerator, but the price point had me get a 128GB for $10 more.

When plugged right into the back of the late 2012 iMac ethernet port I was able to load my 3.5TB iTunes library onto it fairly quickly. I think the speeds might have been as high as 250-300GB transferred per hour (while writing to my 6TB LaCie Thunderbolt drive I saw 450GB copied per hour due to mechanical drive limitations).

Over the home network I am still writing to the drive as fast or faster than a 4 year old USB 2.0 Western Digital External HD plugged into the iMac's USB port at about 100-120GB per hour if I recall correctly. (all estimates are based on aging memory from 6-8 weeks ago) As I recall, my old 1TB Maxtor USB 2.0 drive only did about 60-70GB per hour when cloning my iTunes library (back in the days when it was that small).

It's working with time machine as well, and I can limit how much space time machine will use before it deletes older backups, so the whole drobo won't be filled up with time machine backup data. And I do not need to mount the drobo "time machine share" with my user name and password again after the initial setup is done - it will automatically find the unmounted share and do the backup.

However, there's a complicated instruction process to use the drobo on the network to restore a time machine backup when the destination computer is in recovery mode and the drive is on the network. So I'd be looking for a second computer and USB hard drive to move the time machine's .dmg file onto the USB drive before restoring via migration assistant to a fresh computer in recovery mode or the first time starting up.

You are not supposed to encrypt the time machine network backup if using the drobo (could mess up the data recovery if a drive fails). But the wrong people can't get to the backup file without your user name and password for the specific drobo share that stores your TM backup (not even the admin has access). And, if they pull the drives from the drobo they should not be able to reconstruct the files on any of the drives without the administrator password and a new drobo box of their own to migrate the drives into. I could be wrong, but that's my understanding.

I highly recommend this drive, and even though it has just a single 1 gigabit ethernet interface, when directly connected it's seems to be running over 2x the speed of my old USB 2.0 drive and about 70% the speed of my USB 3.0 drives. I know an SSD drive via USB 3.0 or Thunderbolt would be much faster, but my speeds for USB 3 and Thunderbolt are more limited by the mechanical drives, not the interface.

UPDATE May 15 2019 - Bought March 2014

For me my Drobo 5N (not 5N2) is best as a storage and backup device, and very easy to upgrade or replace a drive - that's where it shines. I also found the apps running on Drobo to be lacking at times. There was even a period of about a year when I could get no apps to even show up as available to install on my Drobo.

But it got better with a wipe and re-install of new firmware a few years ago, after my Drobo was replaced under Drobocare warranty after a couple of years. It's been going strong since without an issue, except about 1x a year I have a WD Red drive go bad (1 out of 5 each yr). I have coverage until April 2021 and hopefully I can extend my warranty again at that time, like before.

For me PLEX worked fine (as well as Mediatomb and Twonky server). It was Firefly iTunes music server that gave me the most trouble - I could never run the iTunes music server on the Drobo 5N without it crashing after reading some of my iTunes library and halting. I had to learn to SSL into the Drobo to get logs from Firefly but couldn't find them. So, for a while I used my old LaCie 2-drive 2 TB NAS as just an iTunes music server with 330 GB of music, while I used the Drobo for everything else.

Eventually I got a QNAP 4-bay NAS (6TBx4) to replace the LaCie, which does software great (DLNA music servers, iTunes Music server, Plex, or 4-channels of security cameras NVR, etc) and it can be used as a media PC on my HDTV with many apps like YouTube and Firefox. I plugged QNAP into the back of my TV via HDMI, and into ethernet.

I now only use the Drobo for reliable backups of my 8TB iTunes library on my iMac and with Time Machine for several Macs. Drobo works flawlessly with Time Machine or Carbon Copy cloner to back up, and I don't have to mount the volume to my Mac desktop for these 2 apps to find it once I have things set up the first time.

Drobo is the EASIEST of all to upgrade a drive or replace a failed drive, and the drives don't have to be all the same size - it handles all the details and I don't need to go into the NAS OS software to tell it that I'm replacing a drive. When a drive in the Drobo died last Thursday, all I had to do was pop in the spare 8 TB that I kept in case of a drive failure, and the Drobo rebuilt protection within 24 hours - I am using 14.05 TB of the 23.6 TB available, so it takes a while to rebuild with 2x 8TB and 3x 6TB (single disk redundancy).

To be even more protected, I can switch to dual disk redundancy and have 2 drives fail before losing data, and my 14 TB would still fit in the 16.34 TB available (again, 2x 8TB + 3x 6TB but with 2-disk redundancy). Even if I didn't have an 8 TB laying around in case of a failure, with enough free space on the Drobo I could use a smaller drive to replace the failed drive and get data protection back after the Drobo rebuilds. i.e. If my 8 TB failed and I downsized it with my spare 4 TB, and kept dual disk redundancy, I'd still be able to fit my 14 TB in the 14.45 TB available. You simply cannot do this with a standard 4-bay RAID NAS.

Although I bought my Drobo in 2014 and it was replaced once under warranty, I only seem to have 1 WD Red drive go bad each year since 2016 (3 total), so declined to turn on dual disk redundancy (my WD Red seem to last 3-5 years). I don't know exactly what to expect when a drive finally goes bad in the QNAP, but it will certainly NOT automatically acknowledge a new drive without user intervention, and certainly NOT a drive with a smaller capacity than the others. I keep a spare 6 TB WD Red laying around for the QNAP in case of failure, and I have another spare 8 TB WD Red for the Drobo that I received on Monday.

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gadgetman

Good drive but not really as fast as I thought it would be...

Reviewed in the United States on February 1, 2013

Verified Purchase

UPDATE (2/23/2013)
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Drobo 5D speeds are much better now!!! I think it has to do with the caching the ssd offers but not sure... either way I was surprised to see such a boost! At the speeds I'm getting now it clearly blows everything else out of the water!!!

NOTE: I'm assuming the 5N speeds would have also shown speed improvement over time as well given the performance boosts I've seen on my 5D but unfortunately I did not have the drive long enough to find out. The DS1512+ features were too much for me to pass up...

CURRENT SPEEDS WITH 5D and DS1512+

Drobo 5D with Crucial m4 128GB SSD - WD Green Drives
Initial Setup Test
- Write - 201.7 MB/s
- Read - 254.8 MB/s

Synology DS1512+ - WD Red Drives
- Write - 81.8 MB/s
- Read - 107.4 MB/s

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Drobo 2nd Gen vs FS vs 5D vs 5N vs Synology DS1512+
-----------------------------------------------

First let me state that I'm not a professional reviewer by any means. I am doing this purely from an amateur point of view. Nonetheless, as I was doing my research on NAS and DAS units, I did not see many reviews comparing popular models on the market so I decided to do my own to share with you. I realize this isn't an apples to apples comparison by any means due to technology differences but I already had the Drobo 2nd gen and FS and am choosing between the 5N, 5D, and DS1512+. The 5D, with thunderbolt, should be leaps and bounds faster than the rest because of it's ability to connect via thunderbolt but that aside I thought it'd still be interesting for people to see a comparison of all the drives. In any case, on to the review!

This is a review comparing speeds of the Drobo FS, 2nd Gen, 5D, 5N, Synology DS1512+. WD green drives were used in testing the Drobo drives and WD Reds were used in the Synology DS1512+. The 5D and 5N both have Crucial m4 128GB SSD's installed in them. The 5D was attached directly to my iMac via thunderbolt, the Drobo 2nd generation was connected to my iMac via firewire 800, and the rest were connected directly to my Netgear GS108T-NAS (which my iMac is also connected to). All tests were performed on my 27" iMac using the Blackmagic speed test app.

Short Reviews:
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Drobo 2nd Generation (Connected via FW800)
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I've had the Drobo 2nd generation drive since it was released. Not much to say about this drive really, it takes up to four drives of any size and combines them to make one large drive. If you have a computer with FW800 I highly recommend using FW800 over USB 2.0 as the speed is dramatically faster.

Drobo FS
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The FS, in my experience is best used as a primary backup drive. I've used it for the past two years and have used it in conjunction with Plex but speed are not up to par to keep up with 720p or 1080p movies. The movies will play streamed over my network to Plex but it's slow to load and forget about pausing. If you're looking at the FS now, I'd recommend using it only as a backup drive or as an iTunes server. Streaming HD movies from this drive can be painfully slow. Non HD movies play fine, however...

Drobo 5N with Crucial m4 128GB SSD
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I got this Drobo 5N primarily to compare with the Synology DS1512+... Drobo has made some pretty big claims about the 5N regarding speed with the ability to connect an SSD and use gigabit ethernet. My first impression with this drive is that it's a beautifully built drive and was very easy to setup. Just plug in drives and plug in to router and power. Drobo Dashboard automatically picked it up. One thing to note, make sure you update to the latest Dashboard version (2.4.0 at the time of this writing). From what I've read, older versions will not work with this drive or the 5D.

Drobo 5D with Crucial m4 128GB SSD
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There's not much to say about this drive that wouldn't be repeated information from the 5N. It's basically the same drive and design with the only difference being the thunderbolt connection vs ethernet. Below you'll see the speed comparisons. I will note about the speeds below that I did not test either the 5D or 5N without a SSD. I installed the SSD even before plugging the Drobo in for the first time.

Synology DS1512+
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Ok... this is my second DS1512+... the first one I got encountered the blue blinking light of death within the first day. Amazon, however, has a great advance replacement policy so I got a new one pretty quickly and sent back the old one.

I now have the DS1512+ setup with four 3TB WD Red drives and so far it has been performing well. The thing that strikes me the most about the DS1512+ isn't the drive itself or it's construction (which is good but not quite as pretty or well designed as the Drobo IMHO) but it's the software. The software for the DS1512+, which is a web interface, is leaps and bounds better and more advanced than the Drobo Dashboard. I'd say that the Drobo Dashboard is MUCH easier to use for most people but the DS software is MUCH more powerful as it can enable many more options and add-ons that the Drobo simply can't do natively.

Blackmagic Speed Test (Using 3GB Test)
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Reference Drive - WD My Passport 2TB (Connected over USB 3.0 to iMac)
- Write - 66.6 MB/s
- Read - 66.9 MB/s

Drobo 2nd Generation (Connected via FW800) - WD Green Drives
- Write - 36.3 MB/s
- Read - 33.4 MB/s

Drobo FS - WD Green Drives
- Write - 25.7 MB/s
- Read - 38.4 MB/s

Drobo 5N with Crucial m4 128GB SSD - WD Green Drives
- Write - 74.9 MB/s
- Read - 93.3 MB/s

Drobo 5D with Crucial m4 128GB SSD - WD Green Drives
Initial Setup Test
- Write - 111.5 MB/s
- Read - 95.8 MB/s

After 1 Week
- Write - 178.2 MB/s
- Read - 189.1 MB/s

Synology DS1512+ - WD Red Drives
- Write - 83.6 MB/s
- Read - 109.0 MB/s

Conclusion and Recommendation:
-----------------------------------------------
First of all, these are really ALL wonderful NAS/DAS options but which one you get will largely depend on your needs. I'll break down my conclusion and recommendation for each drive based on what I feel would be the best use in today's tech environment (as of 1/27/2013).

Drobo 2nd Generation (Connected via FW800)
- Decent speeds for real world use but only 4 drive bays available which may be limiting for some
- Recommended for those that do not need networking capabilities looking for a cheap and easy way to get a large drive with redundancy built in

Drobo FS
- Slowest speeds of all but has 5 drive bays
- Recommended for those that need networking capabilities built in and ONLY need a drive to backup files with occasional use for streaming movies and music

Drobo 5N with Crucial m4 128GB SSD
- Very good speeds especially when compared to the FS it is replacing
- Recommended for those that need networking capabilities built in and need quick access to their files

Drobo 5D with Crucial m4 128GB SSD
- Most expensive drive of the options I tested but also the fastest because of the thunderbolt interface. Yes, it's expensive but for the extra money you get speed gains over the rest of the pack... while I expected much higher speeds than what I got initially, after a week of use the speeds have dramatically increased... I'm guessing it's due to the SSD utilization but can't really be sure.
- Recommended for those who need the fastest access to files and don't necessarily need networking options

Synology DS1512+
- Second most expensive drive of all the options tested with very good speeds especially when compared to the Drobo FS... the drive is also testing to be marginally faster than the Drobo 5N. The extra cost over the Drobo 5N, for me, is justified by the additional feature set it provides over the 5N. I know that you can install apps on the Drobo but the interface that the DS1512+ provides is much better. It's a web based interface that is like an OS where you can add/remove apps and shares. It's more complicated than the Drobo software but ultimately much more powerful.
- Recommended for those that need networking capabilities built in and need quick but not blazing fast access to their files. Also recommended for those that like to tinker as there are a number of things you can do with this drive that only the likes of other manufacturers like QNAP are able to do (at this moment).

What drives I ended up with:
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I ended up selling my Drobo FS and 2nd Gen and keeping the Drobo 5D and Synology DS1512+. While I was not overly impressed with the Synology DS1512+ at first due to the blue blinking light of death, I've come to appreciate the feature set that it provides. There are a ton of apps and things you can do with this drive. Compared to Drobo's feature set, Synology definitely has more features and is easier to manage add-ons/etc through its web interface.

So why'd I also keep the 5D? Simply put, because of speed. This thing is faster than any drive I've used as a NAS/DAS. While it's not faster than some other thunderbolt drives (from what I've read) and it's not a ton faster than the fastest of the drives I tested, it's still plenty fast for me. Also, another reason I kept it is that I wanted to have redundancy of my data across two NAS/DAS units. In the past, I've had a Drobo and Synology fail on me and I don't want to be in a situation where I have all my data on one drive. Hopefully having two hard drive arrays (synced using Goodsync) will limit my risk to data loss.

I realize that I could use an online service to backup my files, but at this point I don't think it's a viable option especially since it'd take forever to get my data up to the server (over 4TB) not to mention download it back in the case of a local data failure... if you have thoughts on this please let me know as I've always been interested in the idea of cloud backups...

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J. Bevan

You want a good storage experience, this is it....

Reviewed in the United States on February 2, 2013

Verified Purchase

I bought the original Drobo when it first came out a few years ago. I bought it with four 1 Tb WD Green drives. It hooked up as a USB 2.0 device and has worked flawlessly since I bought it. In fact it is one of the oldest pieces of computer gear I own -- but it just keeps chuggin' along. Every once in a while one of those green oblong lights on the front right side turns red. That's when I pop out that drive and swap it for a larger drive (hot swap, no problem) and life goes on. All those drives have been upgraded to larger sizes as my collection has grown to the point where I now have 2, 1.5 Tb drives and 2, 2 Tb drives. It's been a good experience. The original drives still work fine, but I'm sure it's hard for Drobo to make a dependable product that doesn't have built in obsolescence that is almost infinitely upgradable (with regard to the drives) and just keeps working, e.g. the "age" of my original Drobo. What a great piece it has been.

Last year I decided I want to backup some "other" files that are not on my original Drobo so I made the mistake of buying a Patriot Javelin NAS box. I used those original 1 Tb drives in it. It took a LONG time to format them. It worked OK but was difficult to manage. The software that came with the box mostly didn't work -- the iTunes Server software NEVER worked. Product support was sluggish at best - in fact they've really never solved any of my problems and they take a long time to respond. Recently the Javelin refused to boot -- for no apparent reason -- I wrote to them, got no response and decided to take the Javelin out of service and buy this Drobo 5N. Finally, on the day I received the 5N from Amazon, I got a non-response from Patriot.

So now I've loaded my new Drobo 5N with those original 1 Tb drives and am up and running wirelessly with a drive that behaves "familiarly" based on my original Drobo. But some notes are in order:

1. There is a video that basically says "download the Dashboard (Drobo's disk management software), insert your drives, connect the Ethernet cable to your router, connect the power AND voila!! you're up and running. Well, not quite so fast.... In my case, it needed to do "something" with the drives and the Dashboard is not telling me what. Initially, it told me the drives were incompatible, so I called Drobo, got right through, and got an answer, immediately, which straightened the matter out. Because the drives were not "empty" I had to reset the Drobo and tell it it was OK to erase the drives. After that, the Dashboard took over with the startup. My only problem with that process was that it wasn't very lucid in keeping me informed about the status or process.

2. So it took about a half hour to presumably reconfigure or format the drives before the Drobo 5N appeared on my network ready to go -- but that seems to have been because the drives had (Javelin) stuff on them at startup.

3. My purpose in acquiring this box was to backup my iTunes Media folder (which is fat with media). I tried to drag and drop this 215 Gb folder to the 5N. It started copying the material but seemed to "choke", telling me that I didn't have permission to back this stuff up. But when I backed it up folder by folder, it worked pretty well. I called Drobo and reported this behavior and was told that "for that much stuff I should use a backup program." They suggested Carbon Copy Cloner (this is a Apple Mac system), which I already owned.

4. I resumed the backup using the CCC. Drobo Support said that if there were a drive problem CCC would give an error code report and they could then fix the problem from that report. Since using the backup program, there has been no problem and no report generated. That backup worked perfectly.

So the unit itself gets 5 stars with the caveat that if you use "experienced" drives in it, it takes a whole half hour to get it running. (It took most of a whole day to format the drives in the Javelin when I started it up.) I like the wireless aspect of the drive because I can see it throughout my Wi-Fi intranet here at home (5 Macs addressing one drive wirelessly).

Drobo's approach to mass storage and the success I've had with my original Drobo is what sold me on getting this one. It has been one of the most perfect pieces of computer gear I've ever owned -- and I've been in the computer game since the '80's when I owned the original Mac. I like it because you don't have to be a network or storage geek to make it work for you. Once you've set it up, you can pretty much forget it.

A couple of years ago I moved from Texas to Utah (good move!). When I arrived in Utah my Drobo would not come up. I was in a panic because I thought I'd lost 7 Tb of Data. I contacted Drobo -- they got back to me immediately -- and suggested that I use Disk Warrier (software) to restore the data. I did that and did not lose a thing :) I'm not sure what happened in the move to cause this (heqq, maybe it's the altitude) but was very pleased with the support and response which got it all running again in no time.

In their sales propaganda, Drobo says they want their customers to have "a great storage experience" (language they borrowed from Steve Jobs, I think). But actually, from my point of view, they have achieved just that. The attraction of the Mac, for me (after 20 years of Windows computing -- at work), is that I don't have to "fuss with it" to keep it running. As they say "it just works" -- which isn't really hype; by comparison with the Windows world, it is really true. Well, somehow, Drobo has understood that Apple mantra and produced a backup solution that you don't have to "fuss with" -- it just works (also). If the 5N works as well as my original Drobo has, then it may be the last Drobo I buy (!!) not because it doesn't work -- but because it works so well and so dependably.

18 people found this helpful

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Daniel

Caveat emptor - Buyer beware of predatory corporate practices....

Reviewed in the United States on January 18, 2015

Verified Purchase

I often read reviews to help me decide what to purchase, and think it's useful to know something about the reviewer. So....
Frequent purchaser. Rare reviewer. I have been both lovingly and frustratingly referred to as a "techie" or "early adopter" by friends and family. I am fluent in several coding languages, used to build computers as a job, and continue an extremely healthy hobby. That said, on to the stuff you all really care about.

This is my 4th Drobo. I purchased a gen 1 when they first came out and kept it till it died. I have 2 FSs and this 5N. The all worked fabulously for the terms of their warranties and "Drobocare" extended warranties. (Yes I am familiar with the debate about the cost-effectiveness and utilities of purchasing such warranties. Suffice to say, sometimes I do, sometimes I don't. I'm fickle).

At this point you may be thinking "sounds like he likes these things, so why the 2-star rating?" To answer.......

PROS: As I said, for the term of their warranties these things worked great. In fact they often continue to work great past their terms. There are some caveats. You need to be careful with the drives you pick (I currently prefer the WD Red series) and, of course, you need to be current on your firmware. The Drobo line tends to lag behind in adopting new drive capacities and if you're not careful inserting a brand new capacity drive (suck as the 4k drives when they first came out years ago) before the firmware is updated can be BAD. Tech support for the term of the warranties is also good.

CONS: The company philosophy is one of UN-needed (in my opinion) forced obsolescence. Yes technology evolves and you have to keep up in order for things to work. Let's be honest here these are RAIDs. Really nice RAIDs, but RAIDs. The tech is not evolving rapidly. In fact I'd say the difference between the FS and 5N is incremental at best (and that's running them side by side for almost a year). Herein lies my main, large, big ol' not gonna buy a Drobo again, flag....after the 4y they refuse to answer any questions at all. They refer to you to their forums, yes. But that is hit or miss. They are adamant about this refusal. Their only advice when encountering ANY and ALL questions after 4y is to buy a new model! That is blatant predatory business practice, in my opinion.

to wit: I recently encountered a problem with one of my FSs. It is about 5y old. Inside I had 2 x 3TB Seagate Barracudas, and 3 x 4TB WD red. I replaced a 4TB red with a 6tb red (yes I know this was not optimal for increasing space. I wanted the 4TB for another rig.) The Drobo (and yes we're talking FS model here not 5N - but the purpose of this story is to describe the company philosophy so it is relevant) locked up in Data Protection and would not come back online despite hard resets. As I stated earlier Drobos only reply was to tell me to buy a new unit (~$500 + warranty - that they of course always recommend...) Bottom line after a week of fiddling I figured out that both Seagates had failed. I replace them with WD Red and the FS works fine. So again good product if you have the time and knowledge to deal with a crappy company.

2 people found this helpful

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ZapD

Don't consider it a "NAS", it is basically a glorified tape archive.

Reviewed in the United States on February 12, 2016

Verified Purchase

Do you want and exercise in frustration, lack of control, and regret, then you have come to the right place.

The good:
-Holds a lot of data
-Can mix and replace drives easily
-Doesn't require much setup

The bad:
Slow..not just 30MB/s slow, but "Today I will run at 3MB/s, tomorrow i will run at 50MB/s...and on tuesday I will disappear for a few hours for no reason." The Drobo gives you no indication about why it is going slow at any particular time. Forum posts will tell you that it is doing internal maintenance of some sort. Drobo's support page only tells you that there must be something wrong with your network. Sometimes it is so slow that simple file copy commands timeout before finishing.

Disappears for no reason. Sometimes my Drobo will disappear from the network for no known reason. Sometimes it will return in a few minutes, sometimes you have to go though a very long shutdown and reboot process. During this down time it will sometimes show up in the Drobo app, but no shares will be visible on the network. Sometimes it will work with Linux shares, but not show up in windows. It simply isn't reliable for use as anything other than a disk archive. You cannot reliably use it to save active working data such as photos you are editing.

You can't use the full capacity listed in the Drobo app. Basically the Drobo uses the spare disk space left for doing disk maintenance operations. If you fill the Drobo up beyond 75% capacity it will become very slow after any large file operations.

Have a Linux Server? Well you can't' install their monitor and maintenance program. Doesn't that seem odd considering the Drobo actually runs Linux onboard? Do you want to buy a product from a company where the engineers don't write software for the OS they use in their own product.

Consider the Drobo as nothing more than a glorified old-school tape backup system. You can store a lot of data on it, but you can't readily access more than a few files at a time. Is the data safe? Sure as long as you promptly replace a failed drive. Note it runs even slower if you select dual disk redundancy.

Finally, if your Drobo has major issues (such as mine apparently) then you will have to kiss all your data goodbye in order to do any proper diagnostics or maintenance. So besides having a Drobo for backup storage, you will need a third backup storage method in order to actually know your data is safe.

/Edit: Downgraded to 1 star, I would give it zero stars if I could. I want my money back.
My Drobo, despite having the latest firmware now will not allow any new data to be copied to it. Any copy attempt fails after a few minutes.
It also only lets me browse folders slowly. any attempt to extract data also fails after just a few minutes. It is now holding 12 terabytes of data hostage. It isn't a backup or NAS solution, it is a very expensive trap.

/Edit:
Two years later and I still regret buying a Drobo. At 10MB/s, that is the fastest speeds you can achieve if your Drobo fills up more than 60% full. There is no point in having a Gigabit connection if the actual storage device is slower than 100mbps.
I even recently added the SSD, it does seem to boost the read speed of a few often accessed files, but does nothing for write speeds.

Want to use that "Dual Drive Redundancy" feature, well then you can only write 50% of your total capacity, or Drobo automatically disables the feature, without notice and without explanation.

The Drobo dashboard app is nothing more than an annoying Firmware notification. It will constantly notify you of new firmware, even if you already have the update in place. Finally, it will NOT notify you of any drive warnings or errors. Only after I tried to fix the slow speeds (again) did I notice that one of the drives has an error.

/Edit:
Three years later: I bought a Synology! And I couldn't be happier.
A disk on my Drobo started to fail. However, the Drobo didn't do its job. No warning was given in the dashboard. And rather than just fail the disk and turn the light red, my Drobo started a reboot loop. It would attempt to spin up the disks, fail on the last drive, and reboot again.
Apparently if I didn't catch this behavior within a few hours, the Drobo can trash all the drives due to the constant rebooting. Drobo support won't tell you this unless you give them cash due to being out of warranty. Most of their online help as specifically been scrubbed to push you towards paying for support instead of helping you.

After a lot of effort I was able to finally put the Drobo into Read-only mode. I bought a Synology and am not looking back.

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Nicholas Calderone

I LOVE DROBO

Reviewed in the United States on June 1, 2013

Verified Purchase

Drobo 5N is a professional data storage solution at a personal price.
I’ve been a loyal Data Robotics customer since the original USB Drobo. I’ve seen way to many hard drive failures from my time repairing computers to not have a back-up. In fact, I remember losing 500 GB of data on an external Seagate drive I was using as my main source of storage. I learned about the Drobo not too much longer after deciding that my external should be used as paperweight. I bought my first Drobo in 2009 and have been an extreme fan ever since.
A couple of weeks ago, I decided that using the Firewire Drobo was not quite what I needed. I switch between three Mac’s in my house and office. Having my two Drobos hooked to my iMac and having to connect through them to get to my files started to put a strain on my work. This is when I upgraded to the Drobo 5N. It’s Data Robotics NAS. I can’t tell you how excited I was to get it set-up. I took off to my local BestBuy to buy five 2TB 7200 RPM drives so that I had a total of 10TB loaded into the Drobo 5N.
Setting up the Drobo 5N was quick and simple. I plugged the power in and hooked the ethernet cable into the back of my iMac. I then updated to the Drobo dashboard and waited for it to find my new 5N. Now that my Drobo was found, I inserted all five drives. The Drobo dashboard then told me that the disk needed to be formatted to work. One thing that’s very nice with the Drobo 5N is that you don’t need to set-up space for disks. The 5N does it all for you. I started the formatting of my drives which finished very quickly.
The Drobo was now ready for use. I had about 2TB worth of data to transfer over.
I’ve wanted to have a good working NAS for so long and the excitement was killing me. I wanted to see how well this would work while plugged into my Apple Time Capsule over the network.
I was surprised how fast the Drobo connected. My first test was to transfer a 2GB file to my MacBook Pro, my iMac and MacBook Air. The transfer speed was great and I was in love.
The next step in my testing was to set-up accounts. This is something you could not do using the USB or Firewire Drobo. I’m able to have a public folder for people to use while on my network. I can also make my folders username and password protected. Again, this was all done with ease.
I keep most every file I have on my Drobo 5N. Switching from computer to computer and being able to pick-up right where I left off without worrying about a hard drive failure or having to have a computer on that has the file I need is great. Now that my Drobo is fully set-up I wanted to make sure I was doing everything correctly. So, I started looking for articles on the 5N. I have two solid state drives – one in my MacBook Pro and one in my MacBook Air. Using either of those machines is so much faster then working with my iMac. I was thinking that using the 5N over a network using 7200 RPM drives and not solid state drives that it would be slow and worse then using my iMac to send a file over the network. I was definitely wrong. So, in my research I learned about the mSATA card that could be used in my Drobo 5N. There is a slot on the bottom of the 5N that you can insert at anytime – no need to reformat or change anything.
I have used my new Drobo 5N for a few months now and think it’s one of the best investments I’ve made.

Drobo 5N uses Data-Aware Tiering technology. Usually reserved for business-class storage solutions, it is also available in this networked Drobo. It intelligently uses the high-performance SSDs to accelerate performance of the storage array, allowing applications such as Adobe Lightroom, Apple iPhoto or iTunes fast access to data. If getting the fastest performance possible is your thing, you can also load up every drive bay with SSDs. Drobo gives you the flexibility to choose.
Drobo 5N uses Gigabit ethernet and is faster than using Firewire.
Drobo doesn’t just protect you from a drive failure, but also from potential data loss after a power outage. Often found only in arrays that cost tens of thousands of dollars, Drobo 5N includes a battery that protects all data in memory, or cache, that is, data on its way to the drives.
When power spontaneously goes away, the battery keeps the Drobo alive long enough for the data to be written to non-volatile storage, ensuring your important information is safe. This battery recharges itself and is designed to last for the life of the product.
Now with my mSATA card I can tell that it’s such an improvement.
is the Drobo 5N a product I would recommend to you? YES!

No matter if you are a professional or just a casual computer user, everyone has data that is important. Everyone has photos they would hate to lose. Everyone has documents. You can always use online services, but trying to work with big files from the cloud, can be pretty hard and time consuming. Drobo is the best bet when it comes to storage. I hope my little story will help you make up your mind if you were thinking about getting a Drobo.

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Professor H

Kind Of Simple To Use - Sort Of Reliable - Better Than Previous Models

Reviewed in the United States on May 12, 2014

Verified Purchase

Now I know that is an odd title, but this is an odd Nas, and an odd company.
I have had many different nas servers from netgear and synology newest flagship models and now the Drobo 5n.

All nas have strengths and weaknesses that vary from each manufacturer, yet there are consistencies with each manufacturer. What that means is that a problem in one are is a problem for the entire product line for the most part.

Short review on three main NAS I have found:
Synology - great software - problematic recovery if massive failure occurs due to proprietary code.
Netgear- pain to setup and operate - less intuitive.
Drobo- units getting faster finally - customer support is the slowest in the business, and less helpful. They just go down the trouble shoot list asking have you done the stuff we recommend on the website frustrating you into not contacting them again. It's better to get help from their forums from Drobo customers.

Now onto the Drobo

The new 5n contains two notable changes to the underlying hardware. I spoke with Drobo VP Mario Blandini, who informed us that the processor in the 5N has been beefed up from a dual-core ARM CPU to a "multicore" ARM CPU. More than anything else, this will boost throughput over the older models, as one core of the dual-core ARM CPU had been dedicated to running the Drobo's back-end operating system and BeyondRAID storage system, and the other core ran a virtualized Linux instance which handled all the file shares and front-end IO. Large network file transfers were handled by the front-facing virtualized Linux environment and would quickly peg the single available core of the split-brained CPU, even if the disks weren't being taxed. Older models rarely climbed past 30-40MB per second even in large streaming file transfers.

The 5N will share files via AFP to OS X boxes and SMB to Windows systems (with past boxes, NFS could be enabled by downloading and installing an add-on). The uprated CPU and internals should enable the 5N to saturate its gigabit Ethernet port, something previous-generation consumer Drobo products couldn't hope to do even under the best of circumstances.
Hardware wise, the new box looks very much like the Drobo FS, though in addition to the new internals, Drobo has added a two-year warranty, up from one year on its last-generation products.

The software is the best they have offered and is getting more synology like. Bad note they put out an update that screwed up everything and it took months for them to fix.

I have had some issues with connectivity, and failure to stay connected to time machine. So the switches, routers, and Ethernet must be perfect to get advertised speed. Customer service takes 24 hours minimum to answer always. I spoke with them over three months to gauge their speed and effectiveness so you can expect this time lag.

They recently announced a more competitively priced model that looks even better so I would check it out over this older version.

It's easy to use once setup perfectly. The itunes share was a bite to get going, easy on synology. I had to restore content twice using time machine and it worked. Drobo time machine has many many problems. Sometimes it backs up, sometimes it can't find the backup share.

While I am basically satisfied with the drobo as I have worked out many of its bugs, I would not purchase this again I don't think. The new price and feature update does look good though. Would probably get a simpler synology than the 5 bay I had.

UPDATE 6-17-15 Still going strong with no major issues, other than problems using for mac time machine backup. Unreliable for that.

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