Drobo DRDR6A31 5D3 5 Bay Desktop DAS Enclosure

I bought the Drobo to replace the internal storage in my Mac Pro when I migrated to an iMac. The setup, with 5 hard drives, was very straight forward. It automatically monitors the status of the installed discs and within a week the Drobo App told me there was an error on one of the drives that I then returned for replacement. It automatically rebuilt the array when I installed the new one. It was great to catch an early failure before it caused problems.I have the installed SD memory and read and writes are very quick. The power where I live is not great and the small battery backup that allows the device to complete any operations and power down gracefully in the event of a power failure had been useful.I would highly recommend the Drobo for external storage.

Perfect back up solution. Works really well after few hick ups during initial set up.Would adv to put standard wd drives than pro series, you will get silent operation with no vibration. Drobo is fast as long as you have min 3-4 bays filled with drives and gets faster if you put more drives in it.Adv use of msata card So will get even more responsive.Delivery perfect.

Massive storage, fantastic for archiving videos and anything else which can take huge amounts of space. Access speed is very fast using Thunderbolt, and easily fast enough to edit the videos using Final Cut Pro.Disks are hot-swappable, and gives great peace of mind against disks failing. I've used Drobos as primary storage for over ten years, so that shows how much faith I have in them. Because the Drobo 5D attaches directly to the Mac, you can back up all the information on the Drobo with an on-line service like Backblaze, which won't touch network-attached storage.Caveats:1. The SSD you can buy to speed it up makes minimal difference. I wouldn't bother.2. Although I've had disks fail often enough, I've never had a Drobo fail – but if it does you're stuffed. All your data is safe on the disks but the only way you can access it is to buy another Drobo.3. Sometimes, if something unexpected happens (power outage? system crash?) the Drobo won't mount. Fiddling around with it has always got it back, but it can take a *lot* of restarting, plugging and unplugging cables, etc. etc. As I say, I've never lost any data this way, but I have spent a few hours with my heart in my mouth wondering if it would ever mount again.All in all, a clear four-star product.Tech support is geared towards big companies who use lots of Drobos. They're not *too* bad for the small home-office user, but could be better.

This is a nice piece of kit BUT BEWARE, currently (November 2017) Thunderbolt is NOT supported on any Windows systems. (confirmed by their support desk). They really should make this clear in the listing

Excellent Drobo 5D3. Very easy to set up. It is plug in and backup. Expensive? Yes but your important Docs, Photos etc are safely backed up.If you are sitting on the fence. Get it, you will not regret it for the piece of mind , you will get knowing everything important is backed up.

Wouldn’t power on so useless

Excellent device. Easy set up and quiet inspiration. I had to swap an old disk out and it took around a day to rebuild itself on the remaining disks but did so with no problems.