I recently upgraded my Drobo 5N to a new, much faster Drobo 5N2.
I’ve written about Drobo before. Drobo allows me to continue with what is now more than a decade of being the laziest mother’s son on earth when it comes to storing data. For years and years, starting with the original super-slow USB Drobo, I just throw everything at my giant home disk array.
Drobo serves as my TimeMachine backup, my media server, and houses my entire digital library of photography.
The new 5N2 is nearly a clone of the prior 5N model, but it has a greatly increased CPU, double the ram and a second, bondable Gig-E port. Rated speeds on the bonded Gig-E are better but don’t read as fast enough for me to have upgraded my home switch/router to one that’d work with it yet. The upgrade, however, is very noticeable for me when reading from multiple devices. The older Drobo unit would hiccup and pause during 1080p playback to two screens, making that impossible. Now my daughter can stream a movie at the same time I can, and we have peace in the house.
I will assume that the CPU plays a REAL role when swapping in disks. I’ve had disk failures and on the 5N it was pleasantly quick to recover, the original Drobo unit took weeks.
Drobo 5N2: Network Attached Storage (NAS) 5-Bay Array, 2X Gigabit Ethernet Ports (DRDS5A21) via Amazon