Drobo 5n NAS review

1. Introduction2. Drobo 5n - Packaging & Bundle3. Drobo 5n - Design4. Drobo 5n - Dashboard OS5. Drobo 5n - Usability6. Testing Methodology7. CrystalDiskMark8. ATTO Disk Benchmark9. Intel NASPT10. IOMETER11. Real Life File Testing12. Power13. Closing Thoughts14. View All Pages

As the Drobo 5n doesn't use RAID arrays in the traditional sense, relying instead on the companies BeyondRAID technology we used sets of disks to test its performance.

Disk set 1 (as supplied to test the drive with)
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
as above but with a 256GB Samsung SSD 840EVO mSATA drive in the Accelerator Bay

Disk set 3 (standard KitGuru test drives)
5 x WD 6TB Red (5,400rpm, 64MB cache)

Disk set 4 SSD (using Startech 25SAT35HDD drive bay converters)
2 x 480GB Samsung 845DC EVO, 2 x 400GB Samsung 845DC  PRO, 1 x Corsair 480GB Neutron XTi

Software:
Atto Disk Benchmark.
CrystalMark 3.0.3.
IOMeter.
Intel NASPT.

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.

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