Drobo Launches Upgraded 5 Bay NAS

[Julio Urquidi]

The 5N2 is the second generation of the company's popular five bay NAS targeted at SOHO and SMB users. It features two GbE ports that support adaptive link bonding, an upgraded processor, hot data caching and Drobo Apps designed to extend the Drobo 5N2’s functionality.

The 5N2 holds up to five 3.5" SATA HDDs and SSDs of any capacity, spindle speed or cache and includes an mSATA SSD slot for fast cache support.

Drobo's signature BeyondRAID technology is focused on making increasing/upgrading capacity a lot easier as capacity requirements increase over time. It includes thin provisioning, instant disk expansion, virtual hot spares and mixed drive size utilization.

BeyondRAID also provides data security using a journaled architecture that eliminates the RAID5 write hole and protects against single or dual drive failure. Other data protection features include battery-backed cache, hot data cache with read-ahead, periodic background data scrubbing to check and automatically repair data corruption and inconsistencies and cache "pre-heat" that snapshots cache metadata to disk. The 5N2 also includes a built-in battery to help prevent data loss on during power failures

The 5N2 supports the myDrobo platform that includes a range of installable apps. These include Drobo's private cloud DroboAccess and DroboPix apps, as well as third-party apps including Plex, NZBGet, PHP, MySQL and more.

The DroboDR app provides further data security by replicating data to another Drobo 5N2 offsite on a scheduled basis.

Priced at $499, the Drobo 5N2 is available now through the company’s website and select partners.

 

[gzcwnk]

I never cease to be amazed at the cost of these things, $450USD for an empty box with a $30 dollar motherboard inside it giving mediocre performance.

 

[adrian]

I never cease to be amazed at the cost of these things, $450USD for an empty box with a $30 dollar motherboard inside it giving mediocre performance.

I agree but many people will buy them because they can't build one.

 

[sfx2000]

Drobo as a direct attached storage is pretty neat... (via Firewire/Thunderbolt/USB3)... block addressed storage is a different approach.

Not sure how it works with Network Attached things...