Hasta La Gadget!

Drobo has teased its latest model, the Drobo 5N, adding ethernet connectivity to the storage technology in the Drobo 5D and Mini. Replacing the Drobo FS, the new 5N is “very close” according to CEO Tom Buiocchi, and described as “a close sibling to what we already have” making it likely a slight reworking of the five-bay Drobo 5D (pictured) announced back in June.

The Drobo 5N “leverages all of the cool new architecture and capabilities under the hood in the new Drobo 5D and Mini, including SSD support” Buiocchi explains, “with an Ethernet port to connect to your network rather than Thunderbolt and USB.” The executive also suggests that it will use the same speed technologies as the 5D and Mini, which suggests the Drobo Accelerator bay will be included.

That bay accepts an mSATA solid-state drive, which although too small to play a dedicated role in the redundancy array, is used as a caching drive to speed up accessing of commonly-required files. That’s only part of the speed improvements over the previous generation, Drobo claims, however.

Exact release times haven’t been confirmed, though “I certainly wouldn’t buy another networked storage device in the next few weeks if I were you” Buiocchi suggests. However, the Drobo 5D is priced at $849 for a point of reference, with Drobo offering a 60GB mSATA SSD for the Drobo Accelerator bay at $169.

Drobo 5N teased with ethernet connectivity is written by Chris Davies & originally posted on SlashGear.
© 2005 – 2012, SlashGear. All right reserved.

The new Drobo B1200i 12-bay storage drive can hold both hard disk drives and solid state drives, providing up to 36TB of storage space. The Drobo B1200i uses the company’s automatic data-tiering software that boosts performance by up to 300 percent compared to its predecessors. This storage device also provides a removable controller card, hot-swappable power supplies and a hot-swappable cooling fan unit. The Drobo B1200i 12-bay storage drive is priced at $11,999. [Drobo]

It’s time to get serious about a solid state drive upgrade with Drobo’s brand new B1200i SSD, complete with what the manufacturer says will be a performance boost of up to 300 percent over previous product iterations. This hardware will bring on a hybrid of solid state technology and traditional hard disk drives like SAS or SATA. And what’s fabulous for current owners of the B1200i is this: a software update is all you’ll need to gain new performance and functionality from Drobo, and it’s free!

This software update for you ol’ B1200i owners will be listed at http://www.drobo.com/support/updates.php where you’ll be able to download and load it all for free. The new new B1200i SSD release announced this week has the ability to make use of a small number of SSDs alongside hard disk drives to make one single economically sound storage system. This system has also attained VMware Ready status with vSphere 5.0 certification.

Microsoft, VMware and Citrix environments will be able to make good use of the Drobo B1200i SSD, as will data protection solutions supporting Veeam, Acronis and Symantec backup and replication. Essentially you’re getting a product that works essentially anywhere you need it to – and with its ability to combine the many bits of storage and backup hardware you’ve already got on hand, you’ll be saving a ton of potential dollars you’d otherwise be spending in the future.

Have a peek at the lovely selection of Drobo content we’ve got in our Drobo portal and make sure you check out our Drobo timeline below as well to see which products appeared over the past few weeks and months that landed us here with the new and improved Drobo B1200i SSD!

Drobo B1200i SSD announced with 300x performance is written by Chris Burns & originally posted on SlashGear.
© 2005 – 2012, SlashGear. All right reserved.

Hankering for a Drobo with Thunderbolt? They’re here… almost. Starting today, consumers far and wide can place their pre-orders for the Drobo 5D and the Drobo Mini. As a refresher, the former is a BYOD desktop solution with a pair of T-bolt ports and a lone USB 3.0 connector; just bring up to five 3.5-inch HDDs, and your RAID adventures are cleared to begin. The latter is a bantam option that promises the “power and flexibility” of the 5D, but in a miniaturized package that works with the 2.5-inch drives that typically find themselves within laptops. The 5D is listed at $849, while the Mini comes in at $649, and you can find the entire list of authorized partners in Drobo‘s blog post below.

Continue reading Thunderbolt-equipped Drobo 5D and Drobo Mini storage devices now up for pre-order

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Thunderbolt-equipped Drobo 5D and Drobo Mini storage devices now up for pre-order originally appeared on Engadget on Tue, 24 Jul 2012 20:18:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Drobo has just released two new drives, the svelte Dobo Mini and the beefier 5D. The Mini is a four-disk enclosure that takes 2.5” laptop drives and it can automatically set up and and format them for maximum capacity or full redundancy.

The Mini is much thinner than the other members of the Drobo family and supports Thunderbolt as well as USB 3.0. You can also add flash storage as a sort of buffer between the slower drives and the high speed connectors. This improves read write speeds and efficiency. It holds up to 3TB of data.

The 5D can handle up to 16 terabytes of storage as well as tiered SSD storage features that increases up read and write speeds. The drive also has a battery back up so it will finish writing if the power lines go down. The 5D also includes Thunderbolt and USB 3.0 ports.

The Mini costs $599 with no drives installed and the 5D costs about $850.