Meeting Drobo – NAS Made Simple

Specifications

Connectivity

• 1 x Gigabit Ethernet port

Drives and Expansion

• Up to five (5) 3.5″ SATA II/III hard disk drives or solid state drives (sold separately).
• One (1) mSATA solid state drive in the Drobo Accelerator Bay for increased performance (sold separately).
• Drives of any manufacturer, capacity, spindle speed, and/or cache can be used. No carriers or tools required. 
• Expandable by adding drives or hot-swapping drives with larger ones.

BeyondRAID Features

• Thin Provisioning
• Instant Expansion
• Mixed Drive Size Utilization
• Automatic Protection Levels
• Single – or Dual-Disk Redundancy
• Virtual Hot Spare
• Data Aware
• Drive Re-ordering

Management

• Drive bay indicator lights, capacity gauge, status lights
• Drobo Dashboard version 2.6 or later

Operating System Support

• Mac OS X 10.9 and higher
• Windows 10 32 and 64 bit
• Windows 8/8.1 32 and 64 bit
• Windows 7 32 and 64 bit

Network Protocols

• Common Internet File System (CIFS) / Server Message Block (SMB)
• Apple Filing Protocol (AFP)

Hardware Features

• Carrier-less Drive Bays
• Power Fail Protection
• Kensington Lock Port for Security (lock not included)

Additional Software Features

• Hot Data Caching
• DroboApps
• myDrobo compatible
• Maximum System Capacity: 64TB
• Drive Spin Down
• Dim Lights
• OS X Time Machine Support

Warranty

• One (1) year warranty in the US or outside the EU or two (2) year warranty in the EU.

Size and Weight

• Desktop Form Factor
• Width: 150.3 mm
• Height: 185.4 mm
• Depth: 262.3 mm
• Weight: 3.9 kg without hard drives, power supply, or packaging

Power and Cooling

• External Power Supply:
• AC Input – 100-240VAC~2A, 50-60Hz
• DC Output – 12V, 12.5A, 150W max
• Dual, fixed, variable speed cooling fans

Environmental Specifications

• Acoustics – Normal Operation: <30.4 dB
• Operating Temperature: 10°C – 35°C (50° – 95°F)
• Non-Operating Temperature (storage): -10° – 60°C (14° – 140°F)
• Operating Humidity: 5% – 80%

Box Contents

• Drobo 5N
• 1.8 m Ethernet cable
• 1.8 m power cord with power supply
• Quick Start Card

Drobo Applications

The other Drobo applications that you can install through the Drobo Dashboard program. Most of them can be stopped when you don’t need them as well so you can be a little selective as to what is running at any time. The notable applications at this time include:

  • Plex
  • WordPress
  • Bit torrent client
  • DLNA
  • HTTP Download utility

There are other applications that will appeal to the more technically minded such as:

  • Apache
  • Java runtime
  • FTP
  • Command line access

Support Access

Drobo advertise their “DroboCare” service offering which ranges from standard technical support to more involved migration and rescue kits. To be thorough, we contacted Drobo Support and found the consultant to be very patient and helpful. Based on our experience, the support seems to be geared towards the more non-technical end users but when we asked our consultant some more in depth questions about the data protection and expansion functionality, they were able to switch to a more detailed level and give us the detail that we were after.

We couldn’t fault the support experience we had with the Drobo team.

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