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While other members of the KitGuru review team have spent some time with Drobo products in recent years, I wasn't quite sure what to expect. I am one of the few who uses 50% Apple and 50% PC products on a daily basis – so when Drobo asked me to test it on Mac OS they piqued my interest. Much of the KitGuru Vimeo and YouTube content is passed to Final Cut Pro as a final stage for instance so I have a lot of experience with other companies DAS units such as the LaCie 5Big platform.
The Drobo 5D3 has a unique operating system, and while it took me a short while to thoroughly master, there is no doubt that it is very straightforward to use, especially as it removes the need for any kind of user interaction in selecting a RAID configuration. This may not appeal to the hardcore users who love minute detail and control over their storage devices, but for many, the Drobo 5D3 removes a lot of the potential headache.
While other DAS products will require hefty initialisation periods and frequent downtime while migrating data – with the Drobo 5D3 you can simply insert a drive, then add more on a hot swap basis – change them if they fail and even alter capacity, while reading and writing to the unit. No downtime is a heck of a unique selling point in my mind.
Seeing it working first hand is remarkable.
The build quality of the Drobo 5D3 is also very nice, the metal edges are beautifully rounded and the device has worked flawlessly now for me for a month. I even put in a faulty drive to see how the software would react. It dealt with the problem easily, highlighting an alert to remove the drive as soon as possible. It didn't send the software into a self destruct state or some locked out looped error – its been clearly thought through and as far as I can see, pretty much bug free.
There are some things I would like Drobo to think about for future revisions. Firstly, I don't like seeing the total ‘possible' storage in Mac OS. I would rather that this number updated to accurately reflect the storage available to the operating system. As it stands, the only real way to check available capacity is via the Drobo software itself, which to be fair is easily accessible via an icon in the Apple Menu bar at the top of the screen.
I also think that Drobo should include an mSATA drive as standard with their DAS units. The performance differences when this is installed can be quite dramatic and it raises the responsiveness to another level. A 60GB or 120GB mSATA drive wouldn't add an awful lot to the retail price of the DAS – as you can pick them up for around £30-£50 online. My thinking behind this is based on the ‘Drobo logic'.
Drobo are targeting a user base who simply want an experience as close to ‘plug n play' as possible. I am pretty sure that audience won't want to start shopping on Amazon for a compatible mSATA drive, especially when Drobo don't make it clear that anything ‘SandForce' related will not work.
Increase the retail price by £40 and include a good mSATA drive as standard. Take it out of the users hands, but give them the extra cache performance because it transforms some file copy situations dramatically.
The retail price of the Drobo 5D3 is set at £739 inc vat and it will be available at Amazon, eBuyer and Image Store very soon. It is expensive, but it is a rather remarkable bit of kit with a fairly unique selling point – the flawless hot swappable implementation with no downtime.
Pros:
- high build quality.
- nippy.
- mSATA drive enhances responsiveness.
- on the fly drive changes.
- OS is easy to use.
- supports the latest, very large mechanical drives for a total up to 64TB.
- cooling system is quiet in operation.
- very stable and capable user interface.
Cons:
- Mac OS reads maximum possible capacity, not currently available.
- non lockable drive bay cover.
KitGuru says: The Drobo 5D3 is one of the finest secure backup DAS systems available for Mac OS. It is stable, fast and offers huge storage capacity for a home or small business environment. The hot swappable feature supports both drive failures and upgrades – it works flawlessly.
When you say “cooling system is quiet in operation” are you referring to the noise from the unit overall? How quiet is quiet BTW? If I got one of these I would use it in a cabinet in my living room with the rest of my AV gear – BluRay, Tivo, Mac Mini server etc.
Also, how do you feel about the proprietary RAID method used by Drobo? In the past there have been a number of issues and a lot of angry people who have lost data. Their RAID method is now 3 or 4 generations in so I expect that it is fully “debugged.” Do you agree?
There seems to be a lot of inconsistencies in user experience out there with Drobo. On paper it is by far the best solution, but a lot of strongly negative reviews has given me pause. Has Kitguru been using the device continuously and do you still feel this is a strong buy?
In the direct attached storage market.. You’ve got drobo.. you’ve got promise.. and custom enclosures via usb 3.1. (I use all of them)
Promise tech. Pegasus you get super high performance.. but its a standard RAID. so all the drives have to be the same make and model
.. With drobos you lose a little bit of performance but gain flexibility and ease of use.
Custom enclosures you can build it exactly the way you want.. but you will only get usb 3.1 speed.
With drobo or promise, pay for the warranty and the support. Drobo support is very good as long as you keep it up to date and pay for it.
I use them all.. but at home with my photography business, i use drobo. i’ve been using drobo products since their 1st gen 10+ yrs ago. Now i’m using a Drobo 5D. Its been chugging a long for 3 yrs now, no issues other than an occasional bad drive. Its my primary storage.. but its NOT my only storage. I have a onsite and offsite backup too.
Any system can and WILL fail.. you cant just depend on one. Drobo is a great choice as long as you keep the warranty up. Their support has always been very helpful.
The 5d3 is listed with two model numbers DRDR6A21 & DRDR6A31. Any idea what the difference is? The later seems to be the only type available in the UK. I just want to make sure one isn’t configured more for Mac OS, as I’m only on windows. Thanks
the fans are quiet, you get some occasional drive noise.. but you will with any drive.. in a cabnet you’d never know it was there..
The people complaining had no other copy of their data.. any drive system can fail.. these systems are redundant..thats just reckless..
I’ve been running various drobo products for 10 yrs now. I have had better luck with drobo das systems than with promise, g-tech, or lecie
If you use it as recommended, put recommended drives in it.. AND have a backup of some kind, you’ll be fine.
I bought a Drobo 5D3 last week along with 5 Samsung 850 EVO SSD drives. Huge mistake to try Drobo again. I can’t believe how slow it is compared to everything else. Why did they make a thunderbolt 3 version when the maximum speeds you can get are far, far below what thunderbolt 3 offers. The write speed for a 5 x SSD array is much slower than a single drive. Even the read speed for the 5 x SSD array is only 800 MB/s. When I put those same 5 drives in my other device, I get 3-5x better read and write speeds. There is just no excuse for that. If you need performance the Drobo 5D3 will make you sad. It’s not worth wasting a thunderbolt 3 port. https://uploads.disquscdn.com/images/38d7cc3218744efa8cf8ecded856a4eb9af8494ba84bd8eec0bce0889f779d43.png
James, did you figure out why that’s the case, as test show far better performance…
I didn’t see any test that used SSDs inside the Drobo, but my results are definitely faster (at least for reading) than anything I’ve seen posted anywhere.
Many people suggested maybe switching to an “active” thunderbolt 3 cable would improve things. I doubted it would, knowing that the current results were already below what you would expect even with a thunderbolt 2 cable. But I went ahead and spent $75 to get an “active” tb3 cable and re-ran my tests. Guess what? the results did not change at all. The best performance you can hope to get from the Drobo 5D3 is what I have posted above.
I have tested using HDDs, SDDs, USB3 cables, thunderbolt 3 passive and active cables, etc. It’s only slightly slower over USB3 than it is over thunderbolt, which tells you everything you need to know. USB3 is rated at 5 Gbps. Thunderbolt 1 at 10, Thunderbolt 2 at 20, Thunderbolt 3 at 40. But the Drobo doesn’t come close to using even Thunderbolt 2 speeds, so… yeah.
I have tested on my 2017 iMac with a 1GB SSD and 64 GB of RAM. It’s the fastest machine you can get from Apple today. The Thunderbolt 3 active cable is as fast as they come. The Drobo is anything but fast. It doesn’t even utilize enough bandwidth to saturate Thunderbolt 1. That’s just sad.
To say I’m disappointed is an extreme understatement.
James, thank you so much for your reply. For me it’s important, as I’m going to buy myself a new iMac (the full blown one, but not waiting for the pro as that will be overpriced I guess). I’m doing productivity apps and photo (LightRoom – RAW processing) and a bit of video. My intention is to have a 2Tb SDD as main drive, and a fast DAS attached to that as an extension of my main harddrive. (I’ve currently an iMac 2013 with 3 Tb fusion drive, and it’s completely full…). So I don’t intend to use the DAS just for backup purposes. Not eager to consider a NAS either for that, also because I’m using Backblaze as a kind of secondary way of backup, and as you know a DAS can be included in the Backblaze backup, NAS cannot. What alternative would you recommend? Thanks for your insights and advise!
That is my use case as well and precisely why I am so disappointed with the Drobo. I think the fastest DAS you can get right now is the Thunderbolt 3 QNAP stuff, but it’s a lot more expensive than the Drobo. I’m considering changing my workflow so all my “current” and unprocessed photos and Lightroom catalogs live on the internal SSD. As it is, there’s no reason to have the SSDs in the Drobo. The Drobo performs almost as well with fast HDDs… so then I ask myself what I’ll do with the 5 SSDs that I bought for this… and that’s why I may wind up shelling out the money for the QNAP and plugging them in there.
As of now I’m still using the Drobo for my primary storage for photos and Lightroom catalogs. In this configuration my new iMac performs slightly better than my 2013 iMac with the 3 TB fusion drive (sound familiar?). At some point it will upset me enough that I’ll make a change and either buy the QNAP or change my workflow, but so far I’ve just been too busy getting stuff done to deal with it. Hope that helps.
James, but that means if I’d use a QNAP, it’s NAS, so Backblaze won’t include that in their online backup, as they only include DAS, correct?
You can directly connect the QNAP via Thunderbolt 3 just like the Drobo, so it should be considered a DAS, but I can’t guarantee that Backblaze would treat it that way. I don’t use Backblaze, so I don’t know. Check out the QNAP TVS-882ST3-i7-16G-US and see what you think.
James, the QNAP is really very expensive. Think I’m better off buying a Samsung SSD 4TB and attach it over Thunderbolt, and buy a Drobo as the backup device… total cost will be lower, and speed (of the Samsung SSD 4TB higher than the QNAP, no?
James, any comment to what I posted 10 days ago…? Thanks.
I don’t know what Samsung SSD you’re talking about, but unless it involves multiple drives it won’t be as fast as the QNAP. A single SSD drive connected via USB 3.1 will provide almost the same performance as the Drobo, but not close to as fast as the internal SSD or the QNAP (thunderbolt 3).
If you want really fast Thunderbolt 3 external storage, I can recommend the Lacie Bolt 3. It is very expensive. And 3TB gets full quickly. I use it to dump images from my shoots for quick back-up and to keep space on the 1TB disk in my MacBook Pro available for new shoots.