Drobo 5N 6TB: Network Attached Storage - 5 Bay Array - 6TB Storage Included with 3 x 2TB Hard Drives - Gigabit Ethernet Port (DRDS4A21-6TB)

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.

I bought this unit based on the advertisement from Drobo that it could stream media to consoles and TVs. I found a picture on their website showing a single line from the drobo to a console as well as the following quotes within the context of "Home media": "Stream Music, Movies, and photos to tvs and consoles". "Plug it into any switch or wireless router and you're ready to go" So we are clear, those quotes aren't taken out of context, those are on the "HOME MEDIA" page discussing what can be done with movies and photos with a Drobo. What I found out last night is that this can only be accomplished at this time via a third party app AND another server. If this were acceptable, I would have added 2 hard drives to my PC and been done with it. But that isn't what I wanted. I wanted streaming media as advertised. Additionally, the performance I'm getting is abysmal. When I do use a PC to simply watch a video from the Drobo it hickups every 5 seconds for the duration of any video. I'm running the latest firmware, and am connecting to the same router that the drobo is on (Gb connection with no other traffic). If All I wanted was a backup solution, this would be a decent, albeit overpriced solution. However, the misleading advertisements are having me strongly lean towards a return. There is a third party app coming in the future that promises to solve the DLNA issues, but I'm not sure that fully forgives that I bought this product on false pretenses and I also am not sure how much weight I want to put into this not yet released feature. For backup only... the device was packed nice. It was an easy setup. It runs fairly quiet. Its footprint is relatively small for a 5 bay solution. The acceleration seemed to help with copying but did not help with streaming. (I also purchased an Msata card for acceleration). The look is pretty clean and appealing in lieu of so many ugly NAS devices I have seen. This would be 5 stars if their marketing was accurate and the performance of streaming wasn't so poor. If you are interested in raw storage and don't mind the marketing problems, this appears to be a great device. For those looking for streaming to non-PC devices, you might wait until PLEX is released and verify it works as needed, or consider other devices that can do what this one claims. Edit: After querying the Drobo community I found out that an unofficial plugin exists to allow for streaming (which doesn't allow for the current marketing, but in terms of what I want the drive to do, it makes me slightly happier). Getting this to work involves searching the web, finding the correct file from a third party site and then copying it to the right location on the Drobo. Its not difficult, but it is definitely more steps than advertised. Additionally, it was suggested that the drive takes about 48 hours to become "optimized". While this could not be explained further, it does seem that the performance improves after a few days. This is contrary to the setup instructions that indicate that the drive is ready for use once the lights turn green. I changed my review score to 3. If they could get their marketing on board with the current drive, this would be an amazing product. My only issue now is that the drive has become more noisy (case rattling during drive usage).

A lot of people complain about Drobo using proprietary RAID on their devices, but the fact is, if the hardware to access your RAID dies, it doesn't matter what's inside. This device is great, with dual gigabit ports, and when used with a mSATA ssd for a cache, blindingly fast on a gigabit network. The console software is a bit of a pain, as it's over designed and I'm not a huge fan of their app system as it is under designed, but when used simply as a remote RAID NAS, it's excellent. My only caveat is that it is a bit loud when it spins up fully, I wouldn't want it on my desktop in my quiet home office, but if you can put it out of the way, it's not an issue. To summarize, a powerful and fast NAS with single or dual disc failure resistant RAID, a bit loud and poor app implementation.

Take advice from someone who owns the product longer than a week. I have had mine for 3 years now. It seems like every time there is an update from Drobo it really affects the web access functions and bugs up the droboaccess apps and config files. I have to go in and uninstall apps, then reinstall them to get it working again. This happened again this weekend, there was a software update, but this time my file system on drobo ended up being corrupted and made accessing folders over web impossible for users. I could not fix it. Now it has to do a factory reset, to get back to normal. Let me ask you a question? Why would anyone want to buy something which requires factory resets, constant updates and issues for your users to access simple files over network? To me, this is an essential function that should work without flaws. This product is flawed, and I would not invest, or purchase Drobo product ever again. I highly recommend all consumers to research Synology and QNAP products before making your choice. In my opinion, this box has serious flaws, and should not be considered if you have valuable information. Period. Do not buy, please, spend your money elsewhere!

my second unit for backup the fist one. Work perfect. (have to make a manual firmware update at startup...remember this. it's easy but the automatic update didn't work at the first start.) Not the fastest NAS on the market but so easier management than regular raid array for expansion/upgrade of the total storage! Will never have to recreate the whole array of the backup unit / redo a full backup when the volume will be full on the backup unit... this is a big advantage as it take so much time to sync many Tb for the first full backup.

Good for moderate duty usage - playback of video files stable for up to 1920x1080 h.264 on 7200RPM hard drives, however higher resolutions are a bit choppy. Totally fine for backing up local data as a simple 'fire and forget' solution - admin control software is simplified and straightforward, and it has it's own internal rechargable lithium battery so that power failures won't compromise the state of the array (for up to some number of hours written in the manual somewhere). Downside - proprietary file system with vendor lock in. Hardware failure can be resolved by inserting drive pack into a identical or backwards compatible Drobo unit, and default customer service plan (1 year) comes with support (they can mail you a piece of hardware to migrate data off, or keep you running until your new unit arrives). Upside - lower cost than certain synology or QNAP NAS units, good entry level for mass storage in the home, or SOHO.

I love it! Easy install of HD and no configuration. I bought this specifically for my movies and the PLEX app and it is working exactly the way I expected. My Smart Samsung TV & Roku 3 recognized the Drobo instantly and I now have access to all my movies. Worth the price and I will buy another one when I can afford it!