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.
| Hard Drive | 6 TB Desktop |
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