Built on award-winning BeyondRAID technology with single- or dual-drive redundancy, Drobo 5D protects your data without any user interaction, even in the event of multiple drive failures. Drives can be added or hot-swapped on-the-fly for storage expansion with zero downtime. If you’re running low on space, the lights on the front tell you what to do. Just add a drive in an empty bay or remove a smaller drive and replace it with a larger one.
Thunderbolt I/O technology provides performance that’s up to 5x faster than the previous-generation Drobos. This allows you to move large amounts of data in a fraction of the time it used to take. Visit the Thunderbolt technology site to learn more about this exciting new way to connect devices.
Drobo 5D 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. With six Drobo 5D arrays in a chain, you can have up to 96 TB of usable capacity. And, the bi-directional 10 Gbps performance of Thunderbolt allows all devices in the chain to achieve maximum throughput.
Drobo is the only storage array that offers Thunderbolt AND USB 3.0. This latest generation of USB also offers high-performance connectivity and is backward compatibility with any computer running compatible versions of Mac OS X or Windows.
Data-Aware Tiering technology, usually reserved for business-class storage solutions, is also available in this desktop Drobo. It intelligently uses the high-performance flash in SSDs to accelerate performance of the storage array, allowing applications such as Adobe Premiere and Apple Aperture fast access to data. To keep capacity of the Drobo at a maximum, the Drobo Accelerator Bay accepts an industry-standard mSATA SSD, leaving all five 3.5” drives bays available for high-capacity HDDs.
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 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 5D 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.
Drobos have always been space efficient and the Drobo 5D is no exception. It was designed from the ground up to provide very high capacity without taking up a lot of your valuable desk space. It is compact mostly because of Drobo’s unique carrierless drive-bay design, allowing drives to be installed very close to each other. The result is an attractive storage array that’s up to 34% smaller than the leading competition.
Drobo 5D is also significantly quieter than previous-generation Drobos due to its tuned, large, variable-speed cooling fan. You can even configure Drobo to spin down drives when they’re not in use to further reduce noise and save energy.
Unfortunately, the complexity of RAID has made it challenging for small businesses and consumers to effectively use the technology. RAID has a high learning curve with many options. There's RAID levels 0, 1, 5, 6, 10, 50, and 60 along with unfamiliar terminology like striping, mirroring, and parity.
Aside from complexity, these are the primary challenges with traditional RAID:
If you need to add storage capacity to a Drobo, simply insert additional disk drives or replace the smallest disks with larger ones - no need to change RAID levels, purchase a new storage array or go through the complex administration of pooling RAID groups. The BeyondRAID feature even allows IT managers to switch from single to dual disk redundancy with a single click, thereby ensuring enterprise-level dual parity data protection if required. If a drive happens to fail, Drobo will automatically re-layout the data to return to a protected state without any user interaction.
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PDF, 143K, 2 pages The Fastest Way to Get Up and Running Again
With DroboCare, if something goes wrong, we'll send you a replacement Drobo right away, so you'll have it as quickly as possible—even before you send us back your Drobo. We call it "advanced hardware replacement"; we also expedite your shipment and pay for shipping both ways. With the standard warranty, you pay to ship the Drobo to us and wait until we receive your Drobo and ship you a replacement.
Your Business Safety Net
With DroboCare, phone support is available 24x7, starting the day you activate DroboCare until the end of your coverage. With the standard warranty, phone support is provided only for the first 90 days following purchase and is subject to local business hours.
How Does It Work?
To make it simple, there are two options available when you purchase a Drobo 5D:
1. Standard hardware warranty. You get 1 year of standard hardware warranty with the purchase of your Drobo. It's free and you don't have to do anything—but we would like you to register your Drobo to make it easier for us to provide you with the best support.
2. Standard hardware warranty + DroboCare. Purchase DroboCare at any time during your standard warranty period, extend your warranty from 1 to 3 years, get advanced hardware replacement and 24x7 phone support.
