The Thunder of Drobo!
Today Drobo announced two new products. The Drobo 5D and the Drobo Mini with the “Small is the new BIG”. Both of these have lighting fast connectivity including 2 Thunderbolt ports and an USB 3.0 port. The thunderbolt and USB cables are included with the product, because Drobo has developed their own Thunderbolt cable. Let’s take a closer look at Drobo’s thunder:
Drobo 5D:
First lets take a closer look at the Drobo 5D. Although it might look like the Drobo S, it is designed from the ground up to make sure the storage requirements of today (and the future) have been met. With features like dual thunderbolt ports, a USB 3.0 port and the award-winning BEYONDRAID technology using the Drobo 5D together with Solid State Drives (SSD’s) this beauty is truly a lightingfast storage array.
Drobo Mini:
Then there is the birth of a whole new kind of storage array. These days it is rather normal for people to travel to different places on the planet, it is not always easy to keep your files on your laptop only. But carrying around a Drobo 5D to have the storage you need, is not a preferable solution. Behold the Drobo Mini:
With all the same features as the Drobo 5D this little performance monster (the monster part is truly an compliment ;-)) is just the thing needed for al the people traveling a lot. BEYONDRAID, 2 x Thunderbolt, USB 3.0 together with the possibilty to put in one or more SSD’s you’ll have a IO monster in pocketform….
Performance:
To increase the performance and keep the capacity of these arrays at a maximum Drobo introduced the Drobo Accelerator Bay which accepts an industry standard mSATA SSD. This leaves the drives in the the array available for high capacity HDD’s while maintaning lightning fast capacity.
My view:
With these two storage array’s Drobo is bringing their already award-winning products to the next level. The Drobo 5D will be great for at home. Using SSD, Thunderbolt, USB 3.0, BEYONDRAID, Thin Provisioning, Data-Aware Tiering and a User-Driven Design this baby can be used for photo editing, video editing and much more IO-intensive applications…
The Drobo Mini is equal to the Drobo 5D, but with the difference that it is mobile. All things said about the 5D apply on the Mini, but it’s size will make it much easier to carry around. Believe me this baby will show up on many occasions, I’m sure we’ll see them on many conference’s in the really near feature 🙂
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