So Drobo is coming out with two new models, the Drobo Mini and the Drobo D5.
They look very nice with thunderbolt, usb 3.0. and ssd support.
What do you guys think?
I’ll wait to see the benchmarks for the D5 before passing judgment
i think its probably important hey get the upgrade path from S to D5 sorted - the disks packs need to be directly migratable.
Still slow using the Marvel chip set but they are also gonna address that issue as well. However, the price for the Mini & 5D will be relatively higher especially using SSD or industrial/enterprise SSD instead of consumer graded. :-([hr]
While I’ve seen the flat Thunderbolt one (I assume that’s the Mini), I haven’t heard of the 5D and Google isn’t any help. Links?
EDIT: Nevermind, looks like news hit overnight and Google’s being just as lazy as me. 
Product pages, as well as coverage from The Verge and Engadget.
Also note for Googling purposes that it’s the 5D, not the D5.
drobo D5 looks interesting to me, but I’ll wait for the benchmarks, prices and will wait at least 1 year to actually purchase it.
The D5 is 799 and the Mini is 599 on The Verge coverage.
The Mini rendering on top of Engadget page shows a DC barrel socket (external PSU “brick” required) while the prototype shots feature mains socket (means no “brick”; just a cable). The product page mentions “1 m (3.3 ft) power cord with power supply” which in turn is little ambiguous to me. I wonder which solution makes it to the final product.
Edit:
Never mind, “The Verge” coverage makes it clear there’s an external power supply.
Should be 5D instead D5 but wonder why they named it 5D instead T after S or U for Ultra or Ultimate. Btw, just confirmed all disk paks from 4-bay & DroboS 1st & 2nd Gen are upward compatible w/ the 5D. That’s nice to hear.[hr]
Hey, those prices are not bad at all. I thought Drobo will up the price of the 5D to replace the S.
As pretty much every new product recently has to have “3D” somewhere in its name, I’d guess 5D is a marketing speak way of saying “it’s waaaaaay ahead of everything that’s all the rage now” 
Whatever the 5D stand for just hoping “Disastrous” is not one of them like the 1st Gen DroboS especially the eSATA implementation!
I can’t wait for these to become available and then read some real world reviews. They both look good so far.
If they can get close to taking advantage of the Thunderbolt speeds, then they will be on my list.
Well done Drobo
5 disk…
I was wondering if mSATA SSD is included with drobo or I must buy it separately?
As an option.
I suspect that it will be an extra purchase - they might bundle it for more money - just guessing.
thats good - i wouldn’t wnat it pushing the price up for people who would get zero benefit from it
Thunderbolt, while nice, doesn’t excite me. The bottleneck isn’t USB/Firewire/iSCSI - it’s the Drobo itself.
If they speed that up then this may be something worth looking at. If it’s the same old slow Drobo with a fast interface then there is really no point.
I agree. They are saying it’s a totally new unit. So I sure hope it is much faster.
We shall find out soon enough.
I have a Drobo 2nd Gen. It had 1x1TB + 2x2TB drives. It had approx. 2.3TB of data stored on it (about 50% full). I popped out the 1TB drive and replaced it with a 2TB drive. It’s been rebuilding for 2 days and, worse, it’s been consistently saying 120hours to go (for 2 days now).
I think it’d be faster to just wipe it all out and rebuild it from scratch.
Now, while I know that the Drobos weren’t going to be especially fast compared to a regular external (low-end 5400RPM) USB drive, I’m, overall, underwhelmed with performance.
For me it comes down to this: I’ll accept a performance hit for the ease of use of being able to swap out one random drive with another (not having to match drives) but at 2X the cost of everything else it shouldn’t be the difference between a rabbit and a tortoise. It should be: Oh, yeah, it’s slightly slower BUT you can use whatever drive you’d like. Actually, you could make a good argument that, for this price, it shouldn’t be slower at all.
I think Drobo has heard the user feedback about the speed issue.
While just using Thunderbolt alone wouldn’t inspire confidence, the fact that they are touting the ability to use SSDs, the mSATA card for a cache and the built-in battery for power failures DO make me think they ‘got the message’.
Are they using the mSATA card as a pure write cache or do you think is it more ZIL, a la ZFS?