Drobo 5C USB Type-C DAS Review

Drobo's 5C is the world's first self-managing USB-C storage device and is a replacement for the Drobo 4-Bay which is getting very long in the tooth. The 5C is a 5-bay DAS (Direct Attached Storage) unit that, as with all Drobo systems, uses the company's BeyondRAID storage technology. The Drobo 5C has built-in protection against power failures thanks to an internal rechargeable battery that protects data in the cache or memory by saving any operations in progress to an internal SSD. Once the power is restored, these operations are restored and any data written to the disks. BeyondRAID is Drobo's answer to the complicated question of drive security versus ease of use and it's an elegant and an ideal solution for people that are daunted by traditional RAID arrays and all their foibles. BeyondRAID has just two levels - single disk failure (akin to RAID5) and dual disk failure (akin to RAID 6). So there is no complicated working out which RAID array is best for the job you need it to do. Now the clever bit about the technology is that you can use disks of any size and manufacturer. Just stick them into the unit and BeyondRAID will build them into an array. Try doing that with traditional RAID! Another huge plus point for the technology concerns increasing the capacity. With traditional RAID, any increase in capacity is fraught with danger. Usually, all the data has to be offloaded somewhere safe, the new drive is added and then the RAID rebuilt which, in some cases could take hours or even days. Then the data has to be reloaded, which is another lengthy process. You don't have to bother with any of this with BeyondRAID, you just swap out the lowest capacity drive for a new larger one and away you go. No backing up of data or other steps. In fact, while it's rebuilding, BeyondRAID even lets you access your data. It's a similar story switching from single disk failure to dual disk failure mode or vice versa. It's a very simple operation done quickly without any fuss and again your data is accessible while the transformation takes place. 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 The Drobo 5C comes in a large white box, the front of which shows a good clear image of the front of the unit (at actual size), its interface connection type and its suitability for both Mac and Windows. The rear of the box shows the back of the unit, again full size, notes about compatibility and interface with a list of box contents. This is repeated in three languages. One side of the box has been left plain with the exception of a Drobo logo and url address for the company's website while the other side has images and a small specification panel for four Drobo devices including the 5C, the 5D/DT, 5N and the B810n. The unit comes in a snuggly fitting black bag, ideal for a bit of shopping after you've installed the drive, and there's a large white box of all the bits you need to get started. Bundled with the drive is a USB-A to USB-C cable, a 120W power adapter and a plastic bag containing the warranty information and a white Drobo sticker. The only thing missing from our review drive was the large quick start guide card that normally comes with a Drobo device. The Drobo 5C uses the same chassis as the 5n NAS we looked at recently. In fact, the only way to tell them apart is to look at the rear panel where the LAN connector of the 5n has been replaced by a USB-C one. The first thing you notice about the 5c, apart from its really plain looks, is just how much the thing weighs. It tips the scales at a hefty 3.9kg (empty) thanks to its mostly metal construction. The detachable front bezel plate is made from good quality plastic, has a shiny finger print-attracting Piano Black gloss finish and is held in place by magnets. The rear of the unit is dominated by the grill for the cooling fan with the only other things on the rear panel being the ports for the power adapter, the USB-C and the power button. That rear-mounted power button will soon have you cursing if you have the Drobo on a shelf or in a cupboard. So an uninspiring, even dull, looking device. Until you turn it on, that is, when it transforms into a multi-coloured LED light-fest. The front right-hand side of the unit holds a vertical row of drive bay LEDs which glow green, amber or red depending on the what the drives are up to. Usefully, there is a little schematic on the inside of the front plate that explains what the colours mean and what, if any, action needs to take place. At the base of the front panel sits a row of twelve indicator LEDs. The first one is the power mode indicator (green – power on, yellow – standby, red – over temperature) while the last one indicates data transfer activity. The ten in between these two display the percentage of storage space used and these are blue. You can set the brightness levels for the LEDs in the Drobo Dashboard The Drobo 5C has five drive bays which are hidden behind the front bezel. The bays are tool-free and are protected by sprung doors which are forced up and out of the way by pushing a drive into them. Each bay has a latch to hold the drive in place. There’s no form of extra physical security in the way of drive bay locks or similar. The bays support drives up to 10TB in capacity but not all available 10TB drives; there is a compatibility chart on the Drobo website to check which ones it supports. The bays support both 3.5in and 2.5in but in the case of 2.5in drives you need to use bay converters. Incidentally, Drobo recommends IcyBox products on their website but we used Startech 25SAT35HDD converters to test SSDs with the unit and they worked perfectly well. Specifications Drive bays: 5 Tool free bays: Yes Ports: 1 x USB-C Dimensions: 150.3 x 185.4 x 262.3mm Weight (empty): 3.9kg Warranty: 2 years Drobo’s Dashboard OS for the 5C is a cut-down version of the software used for their NAS units. It still makes use of animated graphics to display drive and drive bay information but understandably doesn't have as many features as the networking version. The right-hand side of Dashboard main page has an image of the Drobo with the front bezel removed revealing the drive bays. The image is animated so it mimics what the Drobo is doing, for example, if the drive indicators on the unit are green so are the drive bays in the image, if they should start to flash on the unit, the animation follows suit. There is a smaller animated image of the unit on the right-hand side that does the same. The Capacity page shows how much of the 5C's capacity is being used. Clicking on the usage button will show how that capacity is divided up between space that is available for data, reserved for expansion, used for protection and any overhead. Setting up the Drobo 5C is pretty straightforward and fast. All you do is download the Dashboard OS from the Drobo website, load your choice of disks and fire it up. The unit does the rest. From loading the last disk in the device to being ready to use takes around 20 minutes. One of the best aspects of Drobo's BeyondRAID technology is its ability to use a mix of disks and disk sizes to build an array without any problems. Another job that BeyondRAID does that is so much faster and easier than standard RAID is switching from single disk failure support to dual disk support. You just go into the general settings page and click on the disk failure option. The software does the rest. You can even access your data while the system is changing from one option to another. As the Drobo 5C doesn’t use RAID arrays in the traditional sense, relying instead on the company's BeyondRAID technology, we used sets of disks to test its performance. Disk set 1 (mixed) 1 x 6TB Toshiba X300, 1 x 4TB Toshiba X300, (7,200rpm 128MB cache) 2 x 2TB Toshiba P300, 1 x 1TB Toshiba P300 (7,200rpm 64MB cache) Disk set 2 (standard KitGuru test drives) 5 x WD 6TB Red (5,400rpm, 64MB cache) Disk set 3 SSD (using Startech 25SAT35HDD drive bay converters) 3 x 960GB Samsung 845DC EVO, 1 x 1TB Samsung 850 PRO, 1 x 1TB Crucial M550 Software: Atto Disk Benchmark. CrystalMark 3.0.3. IOMeter To test real life file/folder performance we use a number of different file/folder combinations to test the read and write performance of the NAS device. Using the FastCopy utility to get a MB/s and time taken for each transfer, the data is written from and read back to a 240GB SSD. 60GB Steam folder: 29,521 files. 50GB Files folder: 28,523 files. 12GB Movie folder: 24 files – mix of Blu-ray and 4K files. 10GB Photo folder: 621 files – mix of .png, .raw and .jpeg images. 10GB Audio folder: 1,483 files – mix of .mp3 and .flac files. Crystalmark is a useful benchmark to measure theoretical performance levels of hard drives and SSD’s. We are using V3.0.3. It comes as no surprise to see the group of SSDs at the top of the 4K graph. They overshadow all the other disks in both read and writes although the read performance does take a hit when the drives are in a dual disk failure mode. The ATTO Disk Benchmark performance measurement tool is compatible with Microsoft Windows. Measure your storage systems performance with various transfer sizes and test lengths for reads and writes. Several options are available to customize your performance measurement including queue depth, overlapped I/O and even a comparison mode with the option to run continuously. Use ATTO Disk Benchmark to test any manufacturers RAID controllers, storage controllers, host adapters, hard drives and SSD drives and notice that ATTO products will consistently provide the highest level of performance to your storage. All the drive arrays top or nearly reach the 200MB/s mark in both reads and writes with the exception of the WD 6TB disk array when it's in dual disk failure mode, where the write performance dives off a cliff compared to the single failure mode write performance. IOMeter is another open source synthetic benchmarking tool which is able to simulate the various loads placed on hard drive and solid state drive technology. We set IOmeter up (as shown above) to test both backup and restore performance on a 100GB partition. The Drobo 5C performs well across all the arrays when it comes to the backup and restore tests with well over 100MB/s transfer speeds for all the arrays for both operations. The Drobo 5C handles the Real Life file transfer tests without missing a beat, with over 100MB/s performance across the arrays for nearly all the tests. We tested the peak power consumption of a NAS at the wall during a run of CrystalDiskMark 5.0.2 as this version of the benchmark runs the read and write benchmark suites separately so its easier to monitor what power the device is using during each function. No surprise to see the SSD-based arrays being the most power efficient. The Toshiba drives of the mixed HDD array suffer in comparison to the WD 6TB Reds because the two X300 drives in the array use 11.30W each and the pair of P300's 6.4W. The 6TB WD Reds use just 5.3W With the 5C, Drobo have brought-NAS level storage management to an external drive. If you don't need the extra features and management that a true NAS brings to the table, or you are in an environment where a network is non-existent but there is a need for massive amounts of storage, then the 5C could be the answer. The Drobo 5C is impressive for something that is basically an external hard drive, albeit an external hard drive on steroids especially as it supports a 64TB volume size. As with the full version that comes with the NAS drives, Drobo's Dashboard OS is easy to use and navigate making setting up the drive a doddle. It also makes managing the drive easier and swapping from single-drive failure to dual-drive failure protection is as simple as a single mouse click. The built-in power protection is a very useful feature and certainly gives peace of mind about what happens to your data should the power fail. And then, of course, you have the BeyondRAID technology which takes away all the fear and worry about setting up a RAID array, including making sure all the disks are the same and working out which array you need. BeyondRAID simply builds arrays quickly with any mix of disks you have to hand. Adding capacity to the unit is as simple as taking out the lowest capacity drive and adding a larger one in its place; BeyondRAID simply adds the drive in as it rebuilds the array in a very short space of time with the neat trick of allowing access to any stored data whilst it's doing it. We found the Drobo 5C on Scan to pre-order for £359.99 HERE. Discuss on our Facebook page HERE. Pros Huge amount of storage potential Power-loss protection BeyondRAID technology Cons It's not a NAS Pricey KitGuru says: An ideal answer if you need huge amounts of external capacity and don't want to go down the NAS route.