DroboPix and companion iOS and Android apps let you view and play photos, music and videos and DroboAccess does the same for web browser access. Remote access to your files is enabled via the myDrobo app. Each is supported via an installable app. The only other options for backing up the 5N2 are BitTorrent Sync, ElephantDrive, ownCloud and Pydio cloud services. Versioning and snapshotting are not supported. DroboDR incrementally backs up the entire Drobo volume to a target NAS on a scheduled basis, with two hours as the smallest interval. The main local backup solution is DroboDR, a replication feature that requires another Drobo as target. The 5N2 has no USB ports, so attached backup is out. SMB and AFP network file systems are supported by default.ĭrobo’s most glaring weakness is in backing up its own data. If you’re not, you can still browse to shares and create your own drive mapping if you desire. A mapped drive is automatically created in Windows for each share if you’re running Drobo Dashboard. Shares can be created, assigned to users and have access privileges set. The default configuration allows one drive to fail without killing the volume. The 1.64 TB capacity shown here results from four 1 TB drives with dual-disk redundancy enabled. The 5N2 supports a single volume up to 64 TB. The Capacity screen shows the capacity of the single volume created from all inserted drives. This means putting it on a UPS / battery backup and not trusting it to be the sole repository of your precious data. Still, you need to be as careful with Drobo as you are with any other centralized data storage device. Note that each drive swap will initiate a volume rebuild process that will take hours.Īs with any other RAID system, if something happens during that rebuild process, you can lose your volume, unless you enable dual-disk redundancy. Changing one of the three 2 TB drives to 1 TB drops capacity down to only 2.72 TB instead of 1.81. With Beyond RAID, you’ll get more total capacity.įor example, Drobo’s Capacity Calculator shows three 1 TB drives will yield a 1.81 TB volume and three 2 TB drives will yield 3.63 TB. Although you can do that on other NASes, volume size will be limited by the smallest drive. Key differences from other automatic RAID systems are the ability to mix drive sizes and to change drive sizes as your capacity requirements grow. be loaded with commonly accessed data.ĭrobo’s "Beyond RAID" system is the grand-daddy (or mother) of the hybrid / automatic RAID systems. My Drobo contact said typical performance gain may be in the 20 – 30% range, once the cache has had time to "heat up", i.e. Drobo says this will help most with workloads that contain a random read component, for example, loading a Lightroom library. Inserting the drive activates a "hot cache". Making that choice a bit easier is the Drobo Accelerator bay on the bottom, which holds one mSATA SSD. But at around $25 a pop, you may decide to stick with good ol’ hard drives. If you want to use 2.5" drives, Drobo recommends Icy Dock’s EZConvert Pro MB982SP-1S. The tradeoff for eliminating drive trays is that only 3.5" SATA drives are supported for direct insertion. The 5N2 retains the 5N’s carrier-less drive bay design you just slide drives right in. The only external clue that you’re looking at a 5N2 is the two Gigabit Ethernet ports on the rear panel. The 5N2 looks very much like the model 5N it replaces, housed in a sturdy aluminum black matte finish box. So when they were ready to launch an updated version of the 5 bay Drobo 5N, they reached out and readily offered a sample for review. Yes, we could have purchased the product and reviewed it, but other priorities always got in the way.ĭrobo’s new management that took over when Drobo was spun off from Connected Data in 2015, however, has no such fears. The story is I’ve tried, but company management was reluctant to submit their NAS for review, fearing its performance would not compare favorably. I’ve been asked from time to time why we’ve never reviewed any of Drobo’s NASes.
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