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.