Drobo introduces two new storage devices for personal and professional users, the 5-bay Drobo 5D and the compact 4-bay Drobo Mini. Both models feature USB 3.0 and Thunderbolt high-speed connection ports and include SSD acceleration. They support SSDs in any of the drive bays and includes an additional Drobo Accelerator Bay to accommodate mSATA small-form-factor SSD for performance boost.
Like other Drobo systems, the 5D and Mini are based on Beyond RAID technology with single- or dual-drive redundancy to protect your data without any user interaction. Each of them has two Thunderbolt ports with support for daisy chaining, and one USB 3.0 port, offering enhanced data transfer speed. The 5D has five hot-swappable 3.5-inch SATA I/II/III drive bays, supporting up to 16GB of protected storage; while the compact Mini, the first Drobo with 2.5-inch drive, has four bays. If SSDs are installed, the performance of these systems will be accelerated, thanks to the Data-Aware Tiering technology. They also feature the ‘carrierless’ design that allows users to install four 2.5-inch drives without the need for any additional drive carriers or screws.
The Drobo 5D and Drobo Mini supports HFS+ and NTFS file systems and work with Mac OS X 10.7.x Lion/10.8.x Mountain Lion, and Windows 7 SP1/Windows 8. Drobo will announce pricing and availability in Summer.
