Drobo 5N (DRDS4A21)

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Drobo 5N

Networked storage for connected home, home office, or small office environment

The Faster, Easier Drobo for Your Network

The Drobo 5N was designed with one purpose in mind: to deliver the best ever experience sharing storage and accessing data. From the moment you plug it in and it is instantly accessible on your network, you’ll know there’s nothing like it. The Drobo 5N is perfect for any connected home, home office, or small office environment needing a simple, safe device for sharing and backing up data over the network.

Not only is Drobo 5N fast, but it’s easy-to-use, expandable, flexible, and protected—exactly what’s expected from a Drobo. You can safely store and edit photos, videos, and audio files as well as store and back up all the computers on your network.

Features

Data Protection and Expandability Made Simple

SDR and DDR on the Drobo 5N

Built on award-winning BeyondRAID technology with single- or dual-drive redundancy, Drobo 5N protects your data without any user interaction, even in the event of multiple drive failures.

Drives can be added or hot-swapped on-the-fly for storage expansion with zero downtime. If you’re running low on space, the lights on the front tell you what to do. Just add a drive in an empty bay or remove a smaller drive and replace it with a larger one.

High-Speed Connectivity

Gigabit Ethernet port on back of Drobo 5N

The Drobo 5N is equipped with a single Gigabit Ethernet port for network connectivity and connects directly to your network to make sharing your data easy. Just plug it into any switch or wireless router and you’re ready to go. You can even connect the Drobo 5N directly to the Ethernet port on your computer without having to configure any settings.

Capacity AND Performance

Inserting mSATA SSD in Drobo 5N

Data-Aware Tiering technology, usually reserved for business-class storage solutions, is also available in this networked Drobo. It intelligently uses the high-performance SSDs to accelerate performance of the storage array, allowing applications such as Adobe Lightroom and Apple iPhoto or iTunes fast access to data. To keep capacity of the Drobo at a maximum, the Drobo Accelerator Bay accepts an industry-standard mSATA SSD, leaving all five 3.5″ drives bays available for high-capacity HDDs.

If getting the fastest performance possible is your thing, you can also load up every drive bay with SSDs. Drobo gives you the flexibility to choose.

Power Protecting Your Critical Data

Drobo 5N battery

Drobo doesn’t just protect you from a drive failure, but also from potential data loss after a power outage. Often found only in arrays that cost tens of thousands of dollars, Drobo 5N includes a battery that protects all data in memory, or cache, that is, data on its way to the drives.

When power spontaneously goes away, the battery keeps the Drobo alive long enough for the data to be written to non-volatile storage, ensuring your important information is safe. This battery recharges itself and is designed to last for the life of the product.

Designed for You

Drobo 5N measurements

Drobo devices have always been space efficient and the Drobo 5N is no exception. It was designed from the ground up to provide very high capacity without taking up a lot of your valuable desk space. It is compact because of Drobo’s unique carrierless drive-bay design, allowing drives to be installed very close to each other.

Drobo 5N is also significantly quieter than previous-generation Drobos due to its tuned, large, variable-speed cooling fan. You can even configure Drobo to spin down drives when they’re not in use to further reduce noise and save energy.

 

Specifications

  • Connectivity

    • 1 x Gigabit Ethernet port
    • 6 ft Ethernet cable provided

    Capacity

    • Up to five (5) 3.5″ SATA II / III hard disk drives or solid state drives (sold separately)
      and one (1) mSATA solid state drive (sold separately)
    • Drives of mixed capacity, spindle speed, and/or cache can be used. No carriers or tools required. Click here for drive recommendations
    • Expandable by adding drives or hot-swapping drives with larger ones. Use the 5-bay Capacity Calculator to estimate available storage in various configurations

    BeyondRAID Features

    • Thin Provisioning
    • Instant Expansion
    • Mixed Drive Size Utilization
    • Automatic Protection Levels
    • Dual Disk Redundancy
    • Virtual Hot Spare
    • Data Aware
    • Drive Re-ordering
  • Management

    • Drive bay indicator lights, capacity gauge, status lights
    • Drobo Dashboard version 2.4 or later

    Operating System Support

    • 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

    Network Protocols

    • Common Internet File System (CIFS) / Server Message Block (SMB)
    • Apple Filing Protocol (AFP)

    Hardware Features

    • Carrier-less Drive Bays
    • Power Fail Protection
    • Kensington Lock Port for Security (lock not included)

    Additional Software Features

    • Data-Aware Tiering
    • OS X Time Machine Support
    • Drive Spin Down
    • Dim Lights
  • Warranty

    Standard 2-year warranty; extend to 3 years and enhance support with DroboCare

    Size and Weight

    • Desktop Form Factor
    • Width: 5.9 in (150.3 mm)
    • Height: 7.3 in (185.4 mm)
    • Depth: 10.3 in (262.3 mm)
    • Weight: 8.5 lb (without hard drives, power supply, or packaging)

    Power and Cooling

    • External Power Supply: AC Input – 100-240VAC~2A, 50-60Hz; DC Output – 12V, 12.5A, 150W max
    • Single, fixed, variable speed cooling fan

    Box Contents

    • Drobo 5N
    • 6 ft (1.8 m) Ethernet cable
    • 6 ft (1.8 m) power cord with power supply
    • Quick Start Card