New Drobo 5D, Drobo Mini Thunderbolt Storage Devices Announced [Video]

Drobo today announced the Drobo 5D and Drobo Mini storage devices featuring Thunderbolt, USB 3.0, automated SSD acceleration, and enhanced hardware and software architectures.

--
Both the Drobo 5D and Drobo Mini include industry-first SSD acceleration -- utilizing the performance benefits of solid state drives (SSDs) and the capacity benefits of hard disk drives (HDDs) to deliver an automated, no-compromise system. In addition to supporting SSDs in any of the drive bays, both units include an additional bay that will accommodate a small-form-factor SSD to achieve significant performance boosts while making all drive bays available for high-capacity HDDs.

The products also support both lightning-fast Thunderbolt (2 ports) and USB 3.0 connectivity, an industry first for storage arrays that will provide flexibility to both Mac and Windows users. The two Thunderbolt ports allow customers to easily daisy-chain devices to accommodate massive growth, and the USB 3.0 port ensures compatibility to millions of USB systems.

Along with SSD acceleration and Thunderbolt / USB 3.0 interfaces, the new Drobo products have been completely redesigned from the ground up with new hardware and software architectures. These enhancements provide a significant increase in processing capability and several optimizations to BeyondRAID that will increase baseline performance by at least five times -- prior to the addition of SSDs -- easily making the new Drobo 5D and Drobo Mini the fastest storage arrays in their class.
--

Drobo 5D:
With up to five drives and an additional SSD bay, the 5D can support up to 16 terabytes of protected, SSD-accelerated data. This is the equivalent of 32 million photographs, 4 million songs, 1 million HD movies, or 48 hours of uncompressed HD video -- all accessible through lightning fast Thunderbolt or USB 3.0 interfaces.



Drobo Mini:
The Drobo Mini measures seven inches square and less than two inches tall and weighs less than three pounds. Drobo invented a patent-pending "carrierless" design, which allows up to four 2.5" drives to be easily inserted into a Drobo Mini without the need for any additional drive carriers or screws. The benefit to the customer is not only the ease of drive insertion and removal, but also one of flexibility - because the design accommodates a common industry drive size, customers are free to choose the drive vendor, type (HDD or SSD), capacity, speed, and price that best meets their needs.

Since the Drobo Mini is portable, it features a ruggedized design that allows it to be transported with drives inside. In addition to being the first Drobo to offer this capability, the Drobo Mini features a custom, miniaturized power supply, and an optional carrying case, making it the ideal storage for professionals who travel extensively.



Pricing, pre-orders, and availability will be announced summer 2012.

Read More