![]() The Volumes menu item simply presents the actual capacity available from the pool of disks as well as how much of it is being used. While Drobo includes a USB-C to USB-A cable in the box, this cable can be replaced with a USB-C to USB-C cable in the future. The transition to USB-C has been slower than expected in the PC space yet is predominant for modern Macs thanks to the adoption of Thunderbolt. The forward-thinking nature of the Drobo 5C’s USB connectivity ensures usability and compatibility with future systems. Firmware 4.1.1 is the most recent version offered for the Drobo 5C. Our unit is outfitted with (5) 5TB drives: (4) HGST Deskstar NAS drives and (1) Toshiba X300 Desktop drive. Upon completion of the install and providing the necessary information to either bind the device to an established user account or successfully creating a new account, the software detects the units that are connected via available methods.ĭouble-clicking the pictured unit brings up the status page which provides the unit’s name (which can be customized), the Serial Number, Health Status, Firmware Version, and the interface which is being used. Installation of the appropriate version of the Drobo Dashboard (based on operating system) was uneventful. An additional feature available for macOS involves provisioning a dedicated volume for Time Machine backups. The primary configuration option, which we’ll delve into during the overview of the Drobo Dashboard product, pertains to fault tolerance settings for installed disks. BeyondRAID, which is Drobo’s proprietary technology for the pooling and redundancy capabilities in this product, is incredible efficient and transparent. The 5C is a very mature product at this time. All units excluding the 5C also contain provisions to add an SSD as a cache to further accelerate performance. Improvements over the past few years have resulted in a number of applications for media serving and disaster recovery being available for the 5N series. Moving up the product stack provides more capable processors within the succeeding units in addition to either Thunderbolt or dedicated network interfaces. While these units are capable of handling online drive replacements to increase capacity, taking a multi-terabyte storage pool down to an available capacity that is smaller than the total quantity of data being stored will present the risk for data loss in the majority of available solutions. Upgrading from a 5C to a 5D3 involves moving the drives from the 5C to the 5D3 while both units are powered off in order to mitigate the risk for potential data loss. One of the beneficial features that Drobo shares in common with competing NAS solutions involves the simplicity of migration. The secret sauce on the backend of the Drobo solution performs the necessary calculations and configuration settings applied from the Drobo Dashboard to present a singular 64TB (Drobo 5C, 5D-series, and 5N-series) or 128TB drive (Drobo 8D) using disks that are installed in the available drive bays. All units within the product line offer tool-less drive installation into all available 3.5″ slots as well as supporting dissimilar drive capacities. This compact box provides a very simple way to take a pool of five individual disks and create a larger volume that is recognized by the operating system of choice. The Drobo 5C serves as the lowest cost entry point into the product stack. Does the Drobo 5C have what it takes to support professionals and prosumers alike? The Drobo 5C: The gateway into the ecosystem At the next tier of direct attached storage solutions, Drobo is a name that has historically provided unique tangibles that are unmatched by competitors within a given price bracket. The dip-switch based configuration model of the ProRAID, when combined with the limitations of a maximum of two drives, will not fulfill workflows that support high resolution video or other I/O intensive operations. While there is certainly a market for what we’ll refer to as entry level external storage solutions, creative professionals will require something considerably more robust to satisfy their needs for capacity and performance. Our look at the Mediasonic ProRAID HUR5-SU3 found it to be a very cost effective solution for repurposing spare hard drives or creating a new volume of bulk storage for computers. External storage solutions provide an easy method to increase the capacity of media and data that may be used in a variety of use cases.
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