Features:

  • Highly scalable network storage array with 64TB filesystem support
  • Gigabit Ethernet connectivity. Supports myDrobo Platform, DroboAccess encrypted-end-to-end remote access, and DroboPix allowing secure and automatic uploads of mobile photos and videos
  • Battery-backed memory to protect against power interruptions with built in internal power supply
  • Optional mSATA SSD boosts performance up to 10X (mSATA card not included)
  • Award-winning BeyondRAID automated data protection. On-the-fly and instant capacity expansion
I LOVE DROBO

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.

Who says you cant stream Blu-Ray ISO's?

I am not going to write a big review on this but I wanted to set people's minds at ease regarding one of my own biggest questions with the DROBO. Can it handle streaming large video files without a hiccup? By large I mean 40+ GB Blu-ray ISO's and play them on a HTPC that is connected wirelessly to the DROBO. The answer is, YES! A quick rundown on my setup. I have a Netgear R6300 AC router which the DROBO is connected to via ethernet cable and my HTPC, a Brix NUC is downstairs connected to my HT HD TV. I can mount the ISO on my BRIX and play it just as if it were stored locally on my BRIX. The DROBO may not have the fastest file transfers compared to some other solutions, but you would have a much more complicated setup (and lots more $$) with making a dedicated file server with a dedicated raid card in it. What I love about this device is that I now have central storage for all my devices and I can view all my movies from any PC in the house. To be fair, I have not done major torture testing like streaming multiple ISO's at a time but I dont have that kind of need anyway. We use Netlfix and Hulu in my house quite a bit and streaming movies from the Drobo is just an additional (and much loved) way for us to enjoy movies. The security the Drobo provides and the large storage capability is exactly what I was looking for and the price was reasonable to me. The simplicity of it is something beginners and more advanced users can benefit from. I currently have 4 Seagate 3TB Barracuda drives installed and I also installed a mSata Crucial M500 120gb SSD. I have not gotten into the apps yet but I look forward to seeing more of what the Drobo is capable of doing. I have noticed a couple of minor hiccups when creating share drives and trying to write things to the new shares. Sometimes, for reasons unknown, I cannot write to shares right away even when I set them up for all users to read/write to them. Resetting the share and rebooting my machine once I am done fixes the problem most of the time and once resolved, does not come back on existing shares. I might be doing something wrong but I dont see how. So basically, if you need a versatile NAS storage solution with the security of a RAID, the Drobo 5N is a great choice! It wont set any file transfer speed records, but thats not what i needed or wanted. If you just want something that works, without the hangup of benchmarks, then buy with confidence. For those who seem to not be able to stream HD videos from the Drobo, I suspect an issue with your WiFi or LAN connection. Look into that before you throw the Drobo under the bus.

Worth the money

Highly recommended. Very reliable. I loaded mine with 5 4TB drives and a 500GB MSATA internal Solid State Drive (although it is also available empty and you can load it with just one hard drive if you like). Working flawlessly for several months now. Easy to set up and maintain with DROBO Dashboard. Excellent support through forums and online/telephone help if needed. Seamlessly backs itself up so no worry if one drive fails. Multi GB files transfer rapidly. Maximum capacity of the 5N is now 29TB, with 5 8TB drives loaded, as the other 11TB will be used for backup and protection should one of the drives fail. The great point about the DROBO is that you can load drives as you need them and drives can hold any size you like. They don't have to match. Lots of versatility. You get what you pay for and in that regard, this is a great price.

Great for data protection and large storage.

For large storage you can't beat this. The only issue I have is that for some reason the Western Digital drive every so often say there is an issue. All I have to do is go into the GUI and tell the Drobo that the drive is ok and it will rebuild it IF it really is ok. Drobo keeps their software up to date automatically and I have had NO issues with the upgrades. The transfer rate is currently slower than I would like for a NAS but I can live with that for the price and quality. I currently have 7 TB of storage.

Awesome NAS/External Storage Solution That Grows w/You & Protects Your Files

I've always been a fan of Drobo storage. I first used one back 2007/2008 and it was love at first sight. Sure it seems as a big cost to swallow but in reality it isn't. Most good external storage solutions are upwards of $100. My configuation was the Drobo 5N device plus 2 4TB drives. It came a little north of $500 but with the ability to expand and replace drives without losing info or having to replace the the whole device is awesome. This is where I think you save money because you won't have to replace Drobo but simply add, this is not considering the time needed to transfer the files to a bigger driver. Drobo does everything on it's own. The only thing I don't like is native file search from a Windows machine (NAS not USB). For that you have to install a 3rd party solution to quickly search for a file. But I blame this on Microsoft, because I was able to do it before.

Still running hot straight and normal after three and a half years. An excellent product.

I spent quite some time researching NAS devices in order to replace my venerable DNS-323 that I had outgrown. Most of the other NAS devices in the 500-1000 range had all kinds of features that I really didn't want to be bothered with. I just wanted to be able to set it up and forget it. The ability to add a drive of any size while the device is running is a big plus for me. They do not need to be matched drives. The fit and finish is superb. The user interface is equally high quality: minimal lights show drive health and capacity. I added 4 WD Red 3TB drives and a small SSD in the mSATA bay. I normally get between 40 and 100 MB per second over my gigabit network. Please note that all of your switches need to support gigabit in order to get good performance throughout. Another note: non-gigabit devices in the same switch can cause issues: one day I noticed I was only seeing 3 or 4MB/sec flowing through and traced this problem to a VOIP phone I had plugged in to the Netgear switch upstream of the Drobo. Perhaps other switches don't slow down to the lowest-common-denominator, but this one did. I used the desktop utility to set up a few shares, one of which is configured for Apple Time Machine. I have a Linux box across the room that has my Plex media on it, and I have cron jobs set up that mount the Drobo share every night and use rsync to back up the Plex media. Note: The Drobo can now act as a Plex server, but the processor doesn't have the grunt needed for transcoding, so as long as your shows are all in the correct format for your viewing devices you should be OK, but don't expect it to reformat on the fly. The Drobo emails me occasionally when things happen, such as me adding a drive. A few weeks ago it started making a lot of fan noise, so I did some research and found a blog where a fellow described exactly how to replace the fan, and which part to order. Search for "Netscraps Replace Noisy Drobo5N Fan" for that article. After about a half hour of work my Drobo was up and running. It did complain because one of the drives wasn't seated correctly, and once I had reseated it the Drobo still spent the night rebuilding itself. It's back to its good old ways now.

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

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.

Home networking with Drobo 5N

After lots of reading and research (primarily on Drobo and Synology), I finally pulled the trigger and went with the Drobo 5N. Here's my take on some of the Drobo's criticism. 1) I read that the Drobo fan was loud. Once set up (with 5 3TB "Red" hard drives), I couldn't hear the Drobo at all unless I was less than two feet away. If you have it on your desktop right next to your work station, you might hear it a little. I have mine hooked up to my router nowhere near where I am working, so I can't ever hear it. I would also say if you work with any sort of other ambient noise, even if the Drobo is very close by, you surely won't notice it. If your work space is quiet enough to hear a pin drop, then you will likely hear the Drobo's fan. But it isn't loud, as has been purported in some reviews. 2) I read that the Synology has faster (wireless) transfer speeds, but only by maybe 10%. I'm a home network, so 10% speed, while helpful, isn't worth hundreds of dollars. One of my first transfers involved putting all of my movies, videos, songs, etc on the Drobo. Everybody measures in mb/sec, which isn't always entirely helpful for me. I found the Drobo accepted wireless transfers at about 1.2gb/minute. The largest transfer I've done so far was nearly exactly 50gb and it took the Drobo 37 minutes. Smaller transfers were about the same rate. Transferring a movie of about 1.5gb took just over a minute. I can easily live with this. 3) The Drobo was hailed with an easy to use Dashboard and set up. It is easy to use once you've used it, but initial set up was a bit odd since the Drobo Dashboard was searching to set up but not implying that it was working or actually seeing my Drobo on the network. The Dashboard was just acting like it wasn't seeing anything. Be patient during the setup. It doesn't take long, but unfortunately, at least in my instance, while Drobo was working, it was not indicating what it was doing, making me think something was wrong. I did not remove a star for this, as perhaps I wasn't seeing something right or whatever. Also, this is a one-time transient setup issue that I was not inclined to ding the product for. I've only had the Drobo set up for less than a week, but so far I'm pretty impressed. We're an Apple family, and this was extremely easy to set up on a Mac (attached to my old Time Capsule router). No issues at all. From out of the box to up and running was less than 30 minutes (I initially set it up with three 3TB hard drives). I later inserted two more 3TB hard drives without turning the unit off. Drobo's lights were red for a bit then they turned green and Drobo showed the additional available space. (I opened a beer and watched to see how long it would take for the two additional drives to complete their process, which took about half a bottle. And no, I'll make no apologies for my timeframe measurement methodology.) My son is still a PC person, so I had to make sure sure the workgroup was set correctly on his laptop and then map the network drive (Drobo). Easy stuff - check out YouTube if you need help with that. Don't blame those issues on Drobo, as if you are unfamiliar, they will frustrate you with any network hard drive. In summary, I highly recommend the Drobo 5N. I'm very pleased with the wireless transfer speeds considering the price. I didn't necessarily purchase this for transfer speeds as much as I needed confidence in electronic safe keeping, and I think it's going to do that job just fine for years to come.

I am so glad I decided to take a chance.

I ordered this product with mixed feelings. Some of the reviews were cotton candy and some were sour pickles, but I needed some help. I had 5 3TB 7200RPM HDD and 3 1TB WD Red HDD on a PCI Raid controller board with battery backup. The 5 3TB HDD's were RAID 6 and the 3 1TB HDD's were Raid 5. I used Windows to backup the OS located on a partition on the RAID 5 onto another HDD connected to a mother board sata controller. I use Crash Plan to back up the data on the RAID 6 partition. All of this is powered by an online 1500 watt UPS. I thought I had a very good plan. Only problem it failed and it failed often with very bad results. Many times the raid 6 would say one of the HDD ad failed and needed to be replaced. Once replaced another HDD would fail and this would process would continue. The whole system would become unusable. It was unusable more that it was usable. Enter Drobo 5N April 23, 2016 Put drives in Drobo 5N went through configuration. Within 45 min all the drives that had been bad were working in RAID 6. Restored all the data from Crash Plan and they have run perfectly since without a flaw. All data is being backed up. Response is faster that the Hardware PCI card provided. I am so glad I decided to take a chance.

The Drobo 5N is a device i have had wonderful success with

The Drobo 5N is a device i have had wonderful success with. The device is super intelligent in the way it raid's the data so that you can loose one or more hard drives. If you want to upgrade the storage capacity of the raid, its as simple as removing a drive and placing the new on in its spot. I do believe there is a maximum amount of data that it can support, somewhere around 64TB. The ability to upgrade the storage of the NAS without having to format and/or setup the raid again is wonderful. Indicator lights on the front of the device show drive health and where it stands on capacity without having to go into the desktop application. A rocker switch on the back of the device ensures that the unit cannot be accidentally turned completely off with out a safe shutdown. The durable metal frame around the outside is sleek and sturdy, showing no wear, skuffs or scrapes as of yet.

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