Drobo 5D3
Lightning Fast Storage for Your Creative Workflow

BeyondRAID:

What's BeyondRAID? Storage without limitations.

BeyondRAID technology, built into every Drobo, delivers all of the benefits of traditional RAID, while providing much more and leaving many of the limitations behind. This next-generation of redundant storage technology brings together enhanced protection, reliability, expandability, and ease-of-use.

Drobos, based on BeyondRAID, interact with computing systems in the same manner as storage arrays using traditional RAID, so installing a Drobo allows you to maintain your current operating system and file system. This eliminates the challenges and costs when moving to a new storage technology.

Problems with Traditional RAID

Developed in the 1980s, RAID (Redundant Array of Inexpensive Disks) was designed to pool disk drives together for increased capacity and reliability for data storage. It has been preventing single disk drive failures causing data loss, and has been used in almost every enterprise data center for decades.

While reliable, the complexity of RAID is a huge challenge for small businesses and consumers. RAID has a high learning curve with many options, levels, and unfamiliar terminology like striping, mirroring, and parity.

There are several primary challenges with traditional RAID:

• Lock-in of RAID Levels
  To change RAID levels, most storage arrays require the data to be moved off, reconfigured, and then moved back on. If you want to move to RAID 6 from RAID 5 for protection against two drive failures, you need to reinitialize and start over. This process could take days to complete.
• Lack of Expandability
  Once drives are configured into a RAID pool, expandability is impossible unless you have a lot of time, or experience. If you want to add more storage capacity, the solution is to create a new RAID pool, leaving you with another chunk of storage to manage - or you can just reinitialize and start over.
• Drive Failures Create Big Risks
  When a drive fails, most RAID implementations enter a state where data loss will occur if another drive falters before the user replaces the failed drive. Also, performance is hampered when in this debilitated state.

Moving Beyond RAID

Drobo's BeyondRAID technology solves the fundamental issues that traditional RAID can't. Built on the foundation of traditional RAID, BeyondRAID adds a layer of virtualization that chooses the correct protection algorithm based on data availability needs at any given moment. Since the technology works at the block level, it can write blocks of data that alternate between RAID protection levels.

If you need to add storage capacity to a Drobo, simply insert additional disk drives or replace the smallest disks with larger ones - no need to change RAID levels, purchase a new storage array, or go through the complex administration of pooling RAID groups.

The BeyondRAID feature can even switch from single to dual disk redundancy with just the click of your mouse through Drobo Dashboard. This ensures enterprise-level dual parity data protection, when needed. If a drive happens to fail, Drobo will automatically re-layout the data to the remaining drives, returning it to a protected state with no user interaction.

Available Features	RAID 1	RAID 5	RAID 6	Everyone Else with RAID	BeyondRAID
Supports Two Drives
Supports Three Drives
Support Four Drives or More
Single Disk Redundancy
Dual Disk Redundancy					1
Mixed Drive Utilization
Thin Provisioning				*
Instant Expansion
Smart Volumes					2
Mixed Drive Utilization
Automatic Protection Levels
Virtual Hot Spare
Data Aware
Drive Re-ordering

* Some vendors (e.g. Synology) offer some options, though they require manual choices / configuration.
¹ Available with 5-bay or Larger Drobos
² Available with iSCSI-capable Drobos

Thin Provisioning is a fundamental capability of BeyondRAID, allowing for infinite capacity expansion by just replacing a drive with a larger one.

Instant Expansion occurs when a new, or larger, drive is inserted without any disruption in service.

Drobo's volumes are Smart Volumes, pulling needed storage from a common pool and then returning deleted blocks back to the common pool, preventing free space from being tied up by any particular server.

Mixed Drive Utilization allows you to insert any drive, of any size, or any type, and Drobo will optimally use it - check out our interactive Capacity Calculator.

Automatic Protection Levels ensures the best algorithm is used to protect from drive failure depending on the number of drives that are inserted, without any user configuration. There is no need to learn about RAID levels or what mirroring or striping is.

Dual Disk Redundancy enhances BeyondRAID protection by guarding from multiple drive failures in a short period of time. Even if two drives fail, BeyondRAID will attempt to use the remaining drives to return to a protected state.

Virtual Hot Spare utilizes all drives at all time with no drives sitting idle waiting for one to fail. With some traditional RAID systems, a drive can be marked as a "hot spare", waiting on standby for a drive failure so it can take over. That's just a unutilized drive that you have to pay for taking up a valuable drive bay.

Drobos are Data Aware, intelligently handling data for added resiliency, performance, and management. Being Data Aware allows the Drobo to have a capacity gauge on the front, quickly recover in the event of a drive failure, enable intelligent tiering of data, and much more.

Drive Re-ordering allows Drobo disk packs to be moved to another Drobo, and even re-ordered, while still functioning - try that with RAID.

How BeyondRAID Works

Now that we've looked at how BeyondRAID compares with traditional RAID and the value that it brings, let's see how BeyondRAID works.

The sections of the RAID stack are drastically reinvented in a Drobo-and it all has to
do with how drives are pooled (disk pack) and the way data is stored (BeyondRAID virtualization).

Thin Provisioning with Smart Volumes

Our volumes are just smarter. Thin provisioning through Drobo's Smart Volumes provides on-demand allocation of storage providing maximized capacity utilization. Smart Volumes are a virtual volume architecture that pull needed storage, on-demand, from a common pool (thin provisioning) and then return any deleted blocks back to the common pool (thin reclamation), allocating these newly available blocks to free space immediately available for new data.

Space allocation is automatically managed, maximizing storage resources. For example, if a large file on a volume is deleted, the free space of the Drobo gets larger. The freed up space is then available to other volumes. Our Volumes are Smart, even enterprise-class arrays with thin provisioning do not return consumed storage back to a common pool at this granular level.

Thunderbolt Technology:

The Fastest Connection To Your PC Experience

Designed from the ground up, our dynamic and lightning fast, Thunderbolt 3 direct attached storage (DAS) solution, Drobo, is supercharged for creative professionals, aspiring media users, and production studios.

Drobo is built with performance using an upgraded Quad Core Processor, 2 Thunderbolt 3 ports, a USB Type-C port and an mSATA Accelerator Bay. In addition, the Drobo is enhanced with our award-winning BeyondRAID technology, creating simplicity and security.

What is Thunderbolt 3 technology?

Thunderbolt 3 brings Thunderbolt to USB-C at speeds up to 40 Gbps, creating one compact port that does it all - delivering the fastest, most versatile connection to any dock, display, or data device. For the first time, one computer port connects to Thunderbolt devices, every display, and billions of USB devices. A single cable now provides four times the data and twice the video bandwidth of any other cable, while also supplying power. It’s unrivaled for new uses, such as 4K video, single-cable docks with charging, external graphics, and built-in 10 GbE networking. Simply put, Thunderbolt 3 delivers the best USB-C.

• Thunderbolt, USB, DisplayPort, and power on USB-C
• USB-C connector and cables (small, reversible)
• 40 Gbps Thunderbolt 3 - double the speed of Thunderbolt 2
  • Bi-directional, dual-protocol (PCI Express and DisplayPort)
  • 4 lanes of PCI Express Gen 3
  • 8 lanes of DisplayPort 1.2 (HBR2 and MST) - supports two 4K displays (4096 x 2160 30bpp @ 60 Hz)
• USB 3.1 (10 Gbps) - compatible with existing USB devices and cables
• DisplayPort 1.2 - compatible with existing DisplayPort displays, devices, and cables
  • Connect DVI, HDMI, and VGA displays via adapters
• Power (based on USB power delivery)
  • Up to 100W system charging
  • 15W to bus-powered devices
• Thunderbolt Networking
  • 10Gb Ethernet connection between computers
• Daisy chaining (up to six devices)
• Lowest latency for PCI Express audio

Solutions and products built to Thunderbolt and Thunderbolt 2 specifications will work with Thunderbolt 3 via an adapter.

Lightning Fast For Creative Workflows

Today’s creative professionals and small businesses need superior performance and high capacity storage for fast media creation and editing, as well as a central backup location. The Drobo is a direct response to this need, using Drobo’s award-winning BeyondRAID technology and the latest Thunderbolt 3 interface. The enhanced speed and power of the latest Thunderbolt connectivity, allows for more pixels and clarity on 4K/5K displays for editing ability. Drobo users also can daisy chain up to six Thunderbolt devices, and have enough power to charge a laptop.

Designed With the Customer in Mind

Drobo products are designed to be simple, safe, and smart. This philosophy places the customer first by providing an easy to use and manageable solution. The Drobo is no exception. The elegantly designed metal array, features carrier-less drive bays, a magnetic faceplate, and intuitive LED display for intelligent management. For even more power, the mSATA Accelerator Bay increases performance by over 30% for frequently accessed data.

Advanced Performance

During a creative process, workflow speed is everything. Having an optimized workflow creates a simpler process for you, while increasing the delivery time for your clients. For the Drobo, we focused on performance enhancements by including an accelerated Quad Core Processor. This will provide speeds up to 2X faster than the previous generation. This blazing-fast speed allows for performance with up to 800 MB/s read and writes up to 350 MB/s*

The mSATA Accelerator Bay renders 30% faster access to frequently used files from popular applications, such as Adobe Photoshop’s Lightroom, Adobe Premiere, Final Cut Pro and more.

Smart Connections and Expandability

The Drobo includes connections and interfaces designed to enhance your workflow. It provides 2 Thunderbolt 3 ports, allowing you to daisy chain up to 6 Drobos for a capacity of 360TB. To transform your photos and videos with quality, 5D3 works with 4K/5K monitor displays. Attaching the 5K monitor display improves your pixel density. It will also work with 2, 4K displays to enable any workflow process.

By using a Thunderbolt 3 port with your MacBook or MacBook Pro, you will be able to trickle charge your Mac with up to 15W of power, designed to remove clutter in your workspace. Don’t have Thunderbolt? USB Type-C port provides an additional connectivity option to accelerate your data transfers.

Innovative Simplicity

Drobo provides the ultimate security with protection against drive failures, power outages and drive installation. Drobo is ready for an unexpected power outage by powering its built-in battery. The smart battery will safely power down your Drobo in the case of power loss and pick up where it left off when the power is restored.

In addition to security, Drobo will automatically protect against a single or dual drive failure. Replacing a failed drive is easy and no tools are required. Drobo allows you to focus on your creative process, without the hassle of storage or complicated RAID configurations.

*Benchmarks are based on all SSDs and mSATA card installed

Data-Aware Tiering:

How do small and medium business (SMB) IT administrators effectively use solid state drives (SSDs) to accelerate their applications? They can't. Either the array is too expensive or the drives must be in their own pool and separate from the rest of the data. Data must be sent manually to the fast volume (SSD) or to the normal volume.

How can the IT administrator figure out what data is transactional in nature, that is, what data should be sent to the fast volume? To make things even more confusing and complicated, data can have mixed characteristics. But to get the most out of expensive SSDs, the solution must be intelligent and fully automatic-the data just needs to go to the right place automatically.

A Drobo is a single pool of drives by design. The user does not need to think about pooling drives or creating RAID groups. Also, drives of different sizes and types can be used in a Drobo. These advanced technologies make Drobos ideal for allowing SSDs and hard disk drives (HDDs) to work together optimally in the same chassis - automatically!

To enable use of drives of different sizes, the Drobo virtualization layer (see BeyondRAID section) sits on top of the physical drives. Because Drobos are data aware, data is placed intelligently in the best place on the drives. With the introduction of SSD support in the Drobo B1200i, SSDs provide a faster tier of storage for data that is transactional in nature, the type of data that benefits from the faster write and access speeds SSDs provide.

SSD Support

With the introduction of SSD support in the Drobo B1200i, SSDs provide a faster tier of storage for data that is transactional in nature, the type of data that benefits from the faster write and access speeds SSDs provide. As data enters the Drobo, if it is transactional, then the data is written to the "transactional" tier comprised of SSDs. If the data is a sequential stream, it is written to the “bulk tier” comprised of hard disk drives (HDDs). Unlike enterprise arrays with auto-tiering, transactional data goes directly to SSDs, which ensures that BOTH writes AND reads are optimized.

Being Data Aware

As data enters the Drobo, if it is transactional, then the data is written to the faster tier of SSDs. Unlike enterprise arrays with auto-tiering, transactional data goes directly to SSDs, which ensures that BOTH writes AND reads are optimized.

As data is being written to the Drobo, transactional data (shown in red) is written
to the faster tier and other data is written to the bulk tier.

Drobo's tiering functionality allows you to store any type of data on the Drobo and the data that can be optimized by SSDs is automatically optimized in flight. This means that all data-mixed data types from 10 or more VMs in a vSphere cluster, Exchange databases/datastores, backup data, or files on a file server-automatically goes to the right place.

One Pool, Multiple Tiers

As detailed in the BeyondRAID section, a Drobo is a single pool of drives. Whether you put three drives or 12 drives in a Drobo, they are all part of the same disk pack.

Two tiers of storage automatically configured in the same Drobo disk pack.

Whether you have 8 HDDs and 2 SSDs or 9 HDDs and 3 SSDs, they will be utilized appropriately without any upfront setup. All the administrator has to do is put the drives in the Drobo.

Fully Automated Tuning

After data is written to storage, data patterns often change. Sometimes a large amount of data is written to storage and not read for weeks or even months. On the other hand, it is not uncommon for a small amount of data to be written and accessed very frequently.

With Drobo's automated tiering, optimization of data doesn't stop when the data reaches a transactional or bulk storage tier. As the stored data is being read off the Drobo, the data is patterned and optimized in the background. Data that becomes hot will be moved to the transactional tier and visa versa. If data on the bulk tier is frequently read and begins to look more like transactional data, it will be migrated to the transactional tier. If data on the transactional tier becomes "cold" with very few or no read requests, it will be migrated to the bulk tier. These migrations occur in the background when the storage is not under high load and do not require any administrative interaction.

When data becomes "cold" it is migrated to the bulk tier.
When data becomes "hot" it is migrated to the transactional tier.

Tiering Without SSDs

Even when a Drobo doesn't contain SSDs, Drobo still puts its automatic tiering feature to work. Without SSDs, the advantage of tiering is to eliminate the write penalty when parity data is created.

As discussed in the BeyondRAID section, a Drobo can automatically have zones of different types. Even when all HDDs in the Drobo are the same, Drobo lays out zones differently on the transactional tier than it does on the bulk tier.

Drobo creates different zone types on transactional and bulk tiers
to tune the storage appropriately for hot and cold data.

For example, mirror zones are more optimized for writes and stripes are more optimized for capacity. Leveraging BeyondRAID technology, zones are automatically created and altered on the fly to optimize the Drobo for the type of data you store on it.

Just Add SSDs … Really!

If your Drobo contains only HDDs, but if your applications need even more performance, all you have to do is introduce SSDs to the Drobo. The SSDs then become the transactional tier and all of the HDDs are delegated to the bulk tier. The only administrative task is to insert new drives into the Drobo.

Technology:

BeyondRAID Technology
Most modern storage arrays aggregate disks and prevent against single drive failures using a 20-year-old technology called RAID (Redundant Array of Independent Disks). While RAID has served many businesses well, it requires up-front knowledge of its functionality and has many shortcomings. BeyondRAID technology built into every Drobo addresses these shortcomings and makes virtualizing disk drives usable by everyone. BeyondRAID provides these enhancements over traditional RAID:

• Thin Provisioning as a fundamental capability allows for infinite capacity expansion by just replacing a drive with a larger one
• Instant Expansion occurs when a new, or larger, drive is inserted without any disruption in service
• Mixed Drive Utilization allows you to insert any drive, of any size, or any type, and Drobo will optimally use it - check out our interactive Capacity Calculator
• Automatic Protection Levels ensures the best algorithm is used to protect from drive failure depending on the number of drives that are inserted without any user configuration
• Dual Disk Redundancy enhances BeyondRAID protection by guarding from multiple drive failures
• Virtual Hot Spare utilizes all drives at all time - no drives sitting idle waiting for one to fail
• Drobos are Data Aware, intelligently handling data for added resiliency, performance, and management
• Drive Re-ordering allows Drobo disk packs to be moved to another Drobo, and even re-ordered, while still functioning - try that with RAID

Drobo Dashboard Management
Drobo Dashboard is the single tool to centrally manage all of your Drobos. Drobo Dashboard gives you status as if all of your Drobos were right in front of you by providing you the same status lights and capacity guage that are on the front panel. All adminitration tasks are a single click away and there's even a built-in data protection tool called Drobo Copy to easily copy data to and from your Drobo. Simply, it's the easiest way to configure and manage business-class storage.

Learn more about Drobo Dashboard.

Data Protection and Expandability
Built on award-winning BeyondRAID technology with single- or dual-drive redundancy, Drobo 5D3 protects your data without any user interaction, even in the event of multiple drive failures. Drives can be added or hot-swapped and updated in real time for storage expansion with zero downtime. If you’re running low on space, the lights on the front tell you what to do. Just add a drive in an empty bay or remove a smaller drive and replace it with a larger one.

Power of Thunderbolt 3 and Flexibility of USB Type-C
Thunderbolt 3 technology provides performance that’s twice as fast as the previous generation, Drobo 5D. This optimizes your performance when transferring large volumes of data. Drobo 5D3 is equipped with dual Thunderbolt 3 ports for daisy chaining. Connect up to six Thunderbolt devices and/or a non-Thunderbolt monitor at the end of the chain. Supports one 5K monitor display or two 4K monitors. By having 5D3 arrays in a chain, you can have up to 300 TB of usable capacity and achieve throughput by enabling the performance of Thunderbolt 3.

Drobo is the only 5 bay direct attached storage array that offers Thunderbolt 3 and USB 3.0 Type-C. This latest generation also offers high-performance connectivity and is backward compatible with any computer running supported versions of Mac OS X or Windows.

Enhanced Time Machine Support
Drobo is compatible with Apple’s Time Machine, which will consume the capacity of an external storage system. By utilizing the Drobo Dashboard, you can simply allocate capacity limits for backups and data storage.

Data-Aware Tiering
Data-Aware Tiering SANs allow businesses to consolidate storage resources and share that storage across all connected servers and their applications. The reality is that different applications have different workloads. Transactional databases require different storage behavior than streaming media applications. Traditional storage has treated all workloads as equal, not optimizing for any of them.

It's called the Drobo Accelerator Bay and it accepts an industry-standard mSATA SSD. So you can add flash to your Drobo without consuming one of the standard drive bays, which are best used to maximize capacity. The mSATA SSD is used to accelerate smaller and random reads from the Drobo, while the HDDs are used for storing and streaming larger data such as photos, video, and user documents.

File and Operating System Agnostic
Drobo and its underlying BeyondRAID technology currently support the Windows and Mac platforms, with file system support for NTFS, HFS+ and FAT32. Since Drobo is a block level system, it easily adapts to almost any environment.

Capacity and Performance
Drobo 5D3 includes a built-in Accelerator Bay, with an mSATA card holder (mSATA card not included). Our patented Accelerator Cache technology keeps a copy of your most frequently accessed data to deliver blazing-fast speeds. The accelerator cache can dramatically speed up loading large photo libraries and other I/O intensive operations, smoothing out workflows allowing you to optimize productivity.

Power Protecting Your Critical Data
Drobo doesn’t just protect you from a drive failure, but also from potential data loss after a power outage. Often found only in arrays that cost tens of thousands of dollars, Drobo 5D3 includes a battery that protects all data in memory, or cache, that is, data on its way to the drives. During a sudden power loss, the internal battery keeps the Drobo alive long enough for the data to be written to nonvolatile storage. The battery recharges itself and lasts for the life of the product.

Redundant Safety
Drobo can ensure your data is safe even if a hard disk fails. You'll feel safer knowing that if disks do fail, Drobo automatically enters a state of self-healing wherein it relays out your data across the remaining healthy disks and sectors.

Proportional Rebuild Times
The time it takes Drobo to rebuild data after a drive failure or removal is proportional to the amount of data stored in the pool - meaning the less capacity that is used, even on a 2TB disk, the shorter your rebuild times will be. This is superior to traditional RAID, which lacks proportional rebuild times, and is forced relay out every drive block even if it does not contain user data.

Since Drobo is "Data Aware", it tracks where data is on each disk, so it can differentiate between used and unused portions of disk. This expedites rebuild times and reduces your risk of losing data to an additional disk failure. In short, your data is safer on a Drobo.

Self-Healing
When Drobo detects a "bad" hard disk, it proactively advises you with a series of warnings ranging from a blinking red LED on its front panel, to pop-up alerts in Drobo Dashboard, to email alerts. What Drobo does next is exceptional. It enters a self-healing mode where it repairs around the bad sector or disk, and will work until it returns to the safest state possible. If Drobo has sufficient time and free capacity (indicated by all lights returning to a solid green state), it can even withstand additional hard disk failures - that's the power of self-healing.

Storage Virtualization
BeyondRAID was designed from the ground up to allow the storage capacity of the array to expand and contract. BeyondRAID makes this a simple process by utilizing a technology called "virtualization." Virtualization provides a layer of abstraction between the data requested by the file system and the physical location of that data on the disk drives. A given piece of data can be located on any drive, and on any physical location on that drive. This is what makes adding a drive to a Drobo so simple. The new drive just provides additional places to store data.

Virtualization is what enables BeyondRAID to effortlessly change the data arrangement on the drives, for example, changing data stored as a mirror into data stored as parity stripe, without interrupting the user access to data. Virtualization completely decouples the physical space available in the array from the space reported to the operating system. This is how BeyondRAID is able to eliminate the need to manually expand/contract the file system as more space becomes available or is removed.

Thin Provisioning
Thin provisioning is a technical term that describes how the BeyondRAID technology communicates with your operating system. BeyondRAID communicates with your OS about how much disk space you have, up to 16TB (this varies with older operating and file systems). Specifying a larger amount of storage than is physically available allows you to grow into the volume without having to reformat or migrate your data in order to add capacity. BeyondRAID automatically also reclaims space as you delete files.

Self-Managing
Drobo is highly automated storage. There are no complex configuration screens, DIP switches, confounding choices, web consoles or other complications that prevent so many other storage devices from working out of the box.

Drive Reordering
One long-standing requirement inherent in traditional RAID-based systems was that if for some reason you needed to remove the drives, you'd have to replace the drives in the exact same order. When you remove your disks from Drobo, you can put them back in any order you like.

Specifications:

Technical Specifications
Connectivity	2 x Thunderbolt 3 ports; second port for daisy chaining Thunderbolt devices, including 5K and dual 4K displays (Mac OS X only) 1 x USB 3.0, Type-C port
Drives and Expansion	Up to five (5) 3.5″ SATA II/III hard disk drives or solid state drives (sold separately). Drobo Accelerator Bay for increased performance with one (1) mSATA solid state drive (card sold separately). Drives of any manufacturer, capacity, spindle speed, and/or cache can be used. No carriers or tools required. Expandable by adding drives or hot-swapping drives with larger ones.
BeyondRAID Features	Thin Provisioning Instant Expansion Mixed Drive Size Utilization Automatic Protection Levels Single - or Dual-Disk Redundancy Virtual Hot Spare Data Aware Drive Re-ordering
Management	Drive bay indicator lights, capacity gauge, status lights Drobo Dashboard version 3.1.1 or later
Operating System Support	Apple Macintosh macOS 10.11 and higher Microsoft Windows 10 Microsoft Windows 8 Microsoft Windows 7
File System Options	Apple macOS: HFS+ Microsoft Windows: NTFS
Hardware Features	Carrier-less Drive Bays Power Fail Protection with Internal Battery Metal Chassis and Cover Kensington Lock Port for Security (lock not included)
Additional Software Features	Hot Data Caching Maximum System Capacity: 64TB Drive Spin Down Dim Lights macOS Time Machine Support
Dimensions	Desktop Form Factor Width: 5.9 in (150.3 mm) Height: 7.3 in (185.4 mm) Depth: 10.3 in (262.3 mm)
Weight	8.5 lb (3.9 kg) without hard drives, power supply, or packaging
Power and Cooling	External Power Supply: AC Input - 100-240VAC~2A, 50-60Hz DC Output - 12V, 10A, 120W max Fixed, 120mm variable speed cooling fan 15W of power to slow charge a Thunderbolt 3 Laptop
Warranty	Two (2) year warranty
Box Contents	Drobo 5D3 3.3 ft (1 m) Thunderbolt 3 cable 6 ft (1.8 m) power cord with power supply Quick Start Card

Diagram:

Sample Light Indicators Diagram

Capacity Calculator:

Use these interactive tools to estimate the amount of data storage available to fit your needs.

Drag drives and place them into the slots. To remove one from a slot just click on it.

This tool is for approximating the space utilisation with various mixed disk configurations. Actual disk sizes can vary between vendors, and values calculated may differ slightly from actual results. Please refer to Drobo Dashboard for precise data calculations for storage installed in your Drobo.

Documentation:

Download the Drobo 5D3 Datasheet (.PDF)