Desktop Hard drives for 5n

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1

Hi All

I have a drobo 5N, which is currently filled with hard drives that have been removed from external enclosures. I am starting to run out of space and now need to consider do I buy another external drive and remove the hard drive or look at changing all the drives.

I know that for NAS’s that the best drives to use are NAS drives like WD Red or segate NAS, but part from the bottleneck of gigabit is there any point to these drives? I know they use less power as they run at lower RPM and are ideal for RAID setups but part from that is there any real benefit.

Currency I am running 5 2TB Segate barracuda and despite their bad press, they have been working perfectly for me. They can be a bit nosey when under load but that doesn’t really bother me.

Any advise is appreciated?

2

You can use pretty much any SATA drive in Drobo, that’s what they’ve preached since the beginning. The NAS-specific drives are better for the reasons you mentioned, but definitely not required. I have a mixture of regular and NAS drives in my Drobo with no issues. I would prefer using just NAS drives, but I buy based on cost/GB.

3

I have found that release 3.1 does not support 4 Terabyte drives. Even though it is now listed in the drive calculator. I am hoping that this will change with the next release of the software for the 5N.