The Drobo 5N2 - A NAS without the hassle

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The Drobo 5N2 - A NAS without the hassle

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Episode Information
Date of upload April 13, 2018
Duration 2:13
Judges
Katelyn Salem Logan George Michael Aranda
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Decision
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Credits
Logan George
Writing, Editing, Filming, Narration
Michael Aranda
Music, Graphics
Todd Williams
Executive Producer



Transcript[edit | edit source]

The Drobo 5N2. It claims to be “the easiest to use network-attached storage on the market today with automation usually reserved for more expensive solutions.”

It has 5 drive bays which are compatible with SSD’s and hard drives. It works with both Mac and PC. And it has dual one gigabit ethernet ports for faster and more reliable performance.

With the 5N2, Drobo is attempting to bridge the gap between network-attached storage for consumers and businesses by offering the features of higher end network drives without the complicated setup or maintenance.

The 5N2 is designed so that you don’t need tools to add or remove drives. All you have to do is pop off the front cover. The lights on the front make managing the 5N2 very user friendly. The blue lights on the bottom indicate how much of its storage is being used. The lights on the side indicate the health of the drives. Green means everything is good, yellow means the drives are nearly full and another drive needs to be added, and red means a drive is full or needs to be replaced.

Integrated into the 5N2 is a failsafe so if any single drive fails, it can be replaced without any down time or lost data. When setting up the device, you can choose between either single or dual drive redundancy so you don’t risk lost files.

Using a 5N2 means you also get access to a suite of apps optimized to work with Drobo drives, including the Drobo Dashboard where you can manage your device and check the health of each drive.

We tested the Drobo on large video projects with 100’s of gigabytes of 4K video, and the 5N2 worked exactly as expected. There weren’t any features in particular that wowed us, but there wasn’t anything that disappointed either.

The Drobo 5N2 claims to be an easy to use network drive, and that’s exactly what it is. Coming from a cloud based storage solution, the speed and convenience of a network drive was great, and having file redundancy without any manual setup made the 5N2 easy to integrate into our workflow without giving up the safety of off site storage.

Something the 5N2 allows for is mixing drive sizes and types. Some enterprise storage solutions limit you to either hard drives or solid state storage, and they can be picky about using different sized drives in the same array. But the 5N2 optimizes your files so that the things you use the most are stored on the faster SSD’s while the larger, less used files stay on the hard drives.

If you don’t have any experience with network attached storage and are looking for a solution for your home or small business, at $500 the Drobo 5N2 is a solution that gets out of the way and lets you focus on what you need to.

The verdict from our panel of judges:

Katelyn Salem: Get it

Logan George: Get it

Michael Aranda: Get it

Thank you for watching, and don’t forget to like, comment, and s--SHUT UP AND CUT TO THE TECH!