I just got my 5n and did some comparison to the fs. the 5n has 2 wd red drives in it with no msata and it flies in comparison to the fs. both connected thru the same net gear gs108 switch i copies a movie 4.12 gigs in size.
fs copy to 6min
fs copy from 5.30 min
5n copy to 55 sec
5n copy from 41 sec.
i also copied the file from the iMac ssd to the 2tb internal spinner that took 40 sec.
So the 5N is approximately 6.5x faster on write and 8x faster on read?
Impressive boost.
I was shocked now the question is what to do with the fs. Maybe I’ll find someone that upgraded from droboS to drobo 5d that wants to trade? My imac only has fw800 so 5d isn’t the best option for me
I use my old FS as a backup for the 5N. If you are doing incremental backups the speed of the FS isn’t such a big deal.
thanks for the info lilmil,
(one thing to bear in mind is that sometimes the “2nd” use of a file, is part cached in menory)
eg if you copy a local hard drive file, and paste it to a usb drive, that is the 1st use.
if you then copy that and paste it somewhere else shortly after, that is the “2nd” use of that file, and it can actually perform part of it more quickly.
to get a fairer test, its good to repeat your existing tests again, and get an average
and to also do a reboot and wait a bit, before trying the other test (just to try to avoid any caching from assisting) 
you could also do that a couple of times, and get a merged % average but either way, if you notice a difference, you’ll be happy
I’d roughly agree with those speed increases, i sold my FS as it was just too slow for me.
the 5N did indeed fly in comparison