Drobo announced the Drobo 5N network-attached storage (NAS) device designed for the connected home, home office, or small office environment needing a simple, safe solution for sharing and backing up data over the network. The Drobo 5N has 5-bays to accept any 3.5-inch hard drive of any capacity, but does not come with any hard drives. The unique feature of this Drobo is its networked connectivity via Gigabit Ethernet.
Like the recently introduced Drobo Mini and Drobo 5D, the new Drobo 5N features Drobo’s patented BeyondRAID and Data-Aware Tiering technologies, to deliver capacity, performance, and data protection that have traditionally been reserved for more expensive, enterprise-grade storage. With BeyondRAID technology, the device automates sophisticated data protection and capacity expansion operations so that even users who aren’t storage experts can enjoy the peace-of-mind that comes with knowing that their data is automatically protected.
Drobo’s Data-Aware Tiering capability intelligently uses high-performance flash (SSD) technology to accelerate performance of the storage array, allowing applications such as Adobe Lightroom and Apple iPhoto or iTunes fast access to data. This unique solution maintains traditional Drobo ease-of-use in that the configuration, provisioning, and performance optimization of the hybrid storage is completely automated.
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A new data protection feature is fully automated so users can enjoy the data safety benefits traditionally reserved for large enterprise customers, and previously unattainable in this price category. The Drobo 5N supports both Mac and Windows systems and can be used in a wide variety of use cases. In addition existing customers of the Drobo FS network-attached storage solution can quickly upgrade to the new Drobo 5N simply by removing the disk drives from the Drobo FS and inserting them into a new Drobo 5N.
Features
- Drobo BeyondRAID, which provides thin provisioning, instant expansion, mixed drive size flexibilty, automatic protection levels, dual-disk redundancy, virtual hot spare, and drive reordering.
- Drobo automated Data-Aware Tiering, which automatically configures and utilizes both hard drives and SSD technology.
- Five storage bays, each of which can hold one standard 3.5 inch SATA hard disk drive or solid state drive; and one mSATA solid state drive in the Drobo Accelerator Bay for increased performance.
- Maximum capacity 20 Terabytes (TB) when configured with 4 TB drives, resulting in 16TB of protected storage.
- One Gigabit Ethernet port.
- Support of Mac OS X 10.7.x Lion, Mac OS X 10.8.x Mountain Lion, Windows 7 SP1 32 and 64 bit, Windows 8 32 and 64 bit operating systems.
- Centralized backup for multiple systems on the network, including very intuitive, native support for Apple Time Machine on Mac OS computers.
- Support of Common Internet File System (CIFS) / Server Message Block (SMB) and Apple Filing Protocol (AFP).
- 2-year standard warranty.
Price and Availability
The Drobo 5N will be available soon for $599.
