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Redesigned from the ground up to meet the data storage needs of today’s media creators and demanding professionals, Drobo 5D builds on the fully automated functionality of previous Drobos by adding blazing-fast performance. Leveraging cutting-edge Thunderbolt and USB 3.0 connectivity—along with the innovative use of solid state drives (SSDs) —Drobo 5D is the highest-performing personal storage array on the planet.

Not only is Drobo 5D fast, but it’s easy-to-use, expandable, flexible, and protected—exactly what’s expected from a Drobo. You can safely store and edit photos and videos as well as store and back up personal data.

Data Protection and Expandability Made Simple

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.

Power of Thunderbolt & Flexibility of USB

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.

Capacity AND Performance

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.

Power Protecting Your Critical Data

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.

Designed for You

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.

Specification