Drobo DDR4A31 5C 5 Bay USB 3.0 Type-C DAS Enclosure

This is a review, two years in to ownership. Flawless. Perfect, no issues. Does what it says on the tin. I've run it continuously powered on for the vast majority of the time I have owned it (I have two 5C's FWIW) and have done multiple disk upgrades and file movements. I will be buying another at some point.PS if you're planning on buying on of these, check who the actual seller is. If it's HDEW (or some variant thereof) check what the warranty / return / repair policy is. HDEW are based in Hong Kong and the UK Warranty is their's NOT Drobo's...

Being cheaper than most alternatives and being relatively simple to set up is a big plus. Transfer rates are okay, through USB 3, but nothing special. It's quiet and inoffensive, so easy to live with.However, I've had a few issues of it not restarting after the computer comes out of sleep, so had to reboot (nothing else would work) and one occasion it reported a bad drive issue that necessitated a rebuild of the data (took 2 days), although I think it was caused by a poor connection of the drive (maybe because the unit was new). Removing and re-seating seems to have cured it.Long term, I've yet to find out because the reliability of the whole system depends upon the box and I've had those hiccups, so I still have niggling doubts. If I was to offer advice to other buyers it would be to seat/re-seat each drive several times initially before powering up, just to ensure a good connection.

Having suffered an external hard drive failure, fortunately I was backed up, but it still caused a lot of hassle. I decided to invest in a Drobo. It has performed perfectly and it is nice to know that if one of the drives in the Drobo fail, your work is still safe and you can carry on working and change the duff drive at leisure without any hassle!

Early review - Only had it for a couple of days. Using as a large primary data store for photos and videos. Arrives in great packaging. Set up is so simple. I put 3 WD red 4tb's in and started moving my data across. Shut down PC and drobo sleeps. All looking good until starting last night when it failed to detect on my pc. After rebooting PC and the drobo couple of times it finally detected. Shut it all down again no issues, however this morning it will not mount after numerous attempts, and then one of the drive lights turned red for a moment before the machine then proceeded to start flashing amber and green. Still going. I've only had it a few days but I suspect this means one of the drives was faulty rather than the drobo causing a problem. Not sure whether this is why the drobo wont mount so waiting on their tech support to answer that. Otherwise, it would seem the drobo is doing what it's meant to and protecting my data for me. More drives on their way! Will update review once properly tested and these issues ironed out.UPDATE - No need for new drives but concerned about reliability....the amber green blinking stopped after a few hours and then it turned green. Then a reboot showed all drives as red. Still not detecting but when I shut down pc the drobo detected and fell asleep?! Started the next day, all drives green and healthy and it detected.....am continuing migrating data across but am currently nervous about the reliability of what it's telling me so dropping a star for now. Still need to figure out whether the issue with the drive not mounting continues or whether the result of the data protection step outlined above...still yet to really test speeds!UPDATE - Drobo support suggested I restore to factory settings which would mean formatting the new drives. This defeats the purpose of buying one of these so I wasn't prepared to do this given time spent migrating data. Instead I replaced given it seemed to be an issue with the Drobo and I'd lost confidence in it. Replacement arrived and I migrated the drives across in minutes. Drobo allows for this without the need to lose any data which is a massive plus! It was seamless. Further, the issue I was experiencing was a fault in the original Drobo. The replacement works perfectly. All bays showing green and mounting on the PC every time. I've tested it for speed and it's reasonable for photo retouching in lightroom and photoshop, but my existing setup wasn't the fastest anyway. Some will want faster am sure. Yet to try video editing, can't see it coping too well with 4K so I'll likely be purchasing an SSD to cover all live work going forward. I still only have 3 drives inserted and believe for best performance, you want to use all 5 bays. The simplicity of the Drobo is excellent I must say, and I'm now really pleased with it. I finally have the ability to grow my primary storage with ease and future proofing. Apologies for the long review but in the event this helps others I'll leave the entire story up. I'd been looking for a DAS for a long while and am not regretting this purchase now one bit despite some initial headaches. Would give 5 if quicker and had some usb ports on the back.

I first wrote a review here in July 2017 which was very positive about the Drobo 5C. I gave it four stars. You will see the review below.I am now adding this important update because I think people should absolutely avoid the Drobo 5C. After I bought the first one I went on to buy four in total. After about a year to eighteen months three of these have needed to be returned to be replaced because they either became very difficult to start up requiring many attempts or they simply died completely. The one that hasn't failed was bought more recently so I am assuming it will fail.You will get one year or maybe two out of the Drobo 5C before it fails in my experience. The only good thing is that they do seem to fail within the warranty period but sending them back is a lot of hassle which you don't need.Before I was using the Drobo 5C I was using FireWire Drobos (2nd Gen), I had four of those and they were very reliable. That's why I made the mistake of committing so much to the awful Drobo 5C. I also have one Drobo 5D which is older than my four 5Cs but so far it has not failed.Avoid the Drobo 5C.Below is my original positive review soon after I bought my first 5C:=====================================================I first started using Drobos in 2010 when I got my first 2nd Gen 4 bay Drobo. I actually kept getting more of those until I was up to four. I am a video editor (mostly) so that explains why I use up so much disc space. Those Drobos have been fine for years although they have always been rather slow. I used them with the FireWire connection which is pretty fast so it was really the Drobos themselves that were slow.A year ago I got the new Drobo 5D and it is really very much faster. Quite a change from the old 2nd Gen Drobos. I am using the 5D with USB 3.0 connection and that is faster than FireWire, but the real speed advantage is that the 5D is a much faster device than my old 2nd Gen Drobos.So just a week ago I purchased the Drobo 5C and this seems to be just as fast as the 5D although it doesn't have quite as many connection options as the 5D. On the other hand I think USB 3 will be fine now for most people, and the 5C is very much cheaper than my 5D was. In the past Drobos have been expensive but flexible, however this new 5C really is much more competitively priced.I can't comment on long term reliability for the 5C but I have had the 5D for a year and it has been flawless for the year, which is what you'd expect. The oldest of my four 2nd Gen Drobos is seven years and the youngest five years, those have been pretty good over that time however in the last months two of them may have misbehaved a bit, but I'm still not sure. I need to analyse the drives. One of them is telling me one of the drives has failed, however it takes forever to reallocate the data (yes they do take many hours to do this, but this one is taking even longer and seems to never want to finish). I need to take the disc pack out and really just check those drives and see what is going on. I have another of my old 2nd Gen drobos which was telling me a drive had gone bad and I had, what I now realise was a bad idea, which was to take the disc pack out and put them back in different slots, thinking maybe the "bad drive" was just a poor connection and this might correct it. Anyway that led Drobo Dashboard telling me the whole Drobo was out to lunch.Those issues were with old 2nd Gen Drobos with equally old and much used drives. However I would say that you absolutely should backup everything more than once. My Drobos are actually used to create two layers of backup so there are identical pairs of Drobos backing up data on my Mac Pro. My old 2nd Gen Drobos are going to be phased out now with my Drobo 5D and 5Cs.In my experience I would recommend that if the Drobo flags up a drive as having problems then do take that drive out and use a utility to check it. I use Prosoft Drive Genius. This will check over the drive very thoroughly. My old 2nd Gen drives have occasionally flagged up a drive as being faulty when in reality there was no fault. I think it is just a connection issue perhaps. You might find that after you have checked the flagged up drive thoroughly it is okay, and you can just put it back in and all will be okay. However always have everything backed up of course.I have given the Drobo 5C four stars. It loses one star primarily because the on/off switch is on the back. This is very annoying. I want the on/off switch on the front. Why put it on the back? I use these for backup and so I want to be able to just switch them on and off easily. It is an improvement on the old 2nd Gen Drobos which had no on/off switch however.