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Drobo 5N2
Simplicity and Speed on Your Network

Drobo 5N2

As of January 27th, 2023, Drobo support and products are no longer available. Please check VirtualGraffiti.com.au for a suitable in-stock replacement or contact us for further assistance.


Drobo Products

Additional Hard Drives can be found with the following links:
Western Digital | Seagate

Drobo 5N2Overview:

The latest generation 5 Bay NAS, the Drobo 5N2 delivers an unparalleled user experience for data sharing, secure backup, remote access and disaster recovery solutions. The 5N2 is the fastest, network attached Drobo available to prosumers and provides up to 2x performance boost with an upgraded processor and port bonding option. The 5N2 is built with Drobo’s patented BeyondRAID™ technology to meet the demanding data storage requirements of connected home users, media professionals and small businesses. The expanded functionality includes technology features of Drobo’s enterprise level products, such as DroboDR for disaster recovery backup. By implementing a level of automation usually preserved for more expensive solutions, and still maintaining the award-winning simplicity found in all Drobos, the 5N2 is the easiest to use NAS on the market.

Leave Your Limitations Behind… Go BeyondRAID

Built on our award-winning BeyondRAID technology, the Drobo 5N2 protects your data without any intervention - even in the event of multiple drive failures. You can even switch from single to dual disk redundancy with a single click, ensuring enterprise-level dual parity data protection when required. Drobo’s with BeyondRAID are also self-healing and have virtual hot-spares. If a drive happens to fail, Drobo will automatically re-layout the data to return to a protected state without disruption.

Drobo takes the up front guess work out of determining the amount of capacity you require. Buy the capacity you need today, and when you need more storage, simply replace your smallest drive with a larger one and immediately use that capacity in seconds. You can even mix and match drive brands, capacities and speeds.

To further enhance your experience, every Drobo comes with Smart Volume technology. Smart Volumes are thinly provisioned volumes that automatically utilize capacity as needed from a common pool of storage. Additionally, as data is deleted, free capacity is returned to that common pool, immediately increasing the available capacity.

BeyondRAID along with Smart Volumes deliver next-generation storage technology by bringing together enhanced data protection, reliability, expandability, and ease-of-use.

Data Protection Made Simple
Data Protection and Expandability Made Simple

Built on award-winning BeyondRAID technology with single- or dual-drive redundancy, Drobo 5N2 protects your data without any user interaction, even in the event of multiple drive failures.

Drives can be added or hot-swapped on-the-fly 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.


Dual Ethernet Ports: Bond Together, or Failover

The 5N2 has dual Gigabit Ethernet ports. These can be bonded together to provide approximately twice the read/write performance you get via a single port. Or they can be used to provide a connection to two different subnets. Furthermore, they can be used in an “active/passive” mode so that if one port fails the other takes over.

Capacity AND Performance
Capacity and Performance

Usually reserved for larger enterprise-class storage solutions, the Drobo 5N2 gives you the option to implement Hot Data Caching through the Drobo Accelerator Bay. This feature intelligently uses high-performance flash to accelerate performance, allowing the fastest possible access to your data. To keep capacity of your Drobo 5N2 at a maximum, the Drobo Accelerator Bay accepts an industry-standard mSATA SSD, leaving all five 3.5” drives bays available for high-capacity HDDs.

If getting the fastest performance possible is your thing, you can also load up every drive bay with SSDs. Drobo 5N2 gives you the flexibility to choose!

DroboApps

The myDrobo platform provides end-to-end secure access to services on your Drobo from the public internet, through a user chosen mydrobo.com address. It enables services such as DroboAccess, Koken and WordPress to be accessed remotely in a secure fashion. DroboPix allows secure and automatic uploads of mobile photos and videos.

Other Drobo Apps are embedded applications that extend the capabilities of the Drobo 5N2. Partnering with strategic application vendors and solution providers (e.g. ElephantDrive Resilio Sync & Plex), Drobo now offers enhanced features that augment user data interaction. DroboApps are designed to be simple to install and configure - just like a Drobo! Installation is performed from within Drobo Dashboard, and all applications are fully supported by Drobo and our technology partners.




DroboApps

Drobo Disaster Recovery



Drobo Disaster Recovery

With DroboDR you can set up a pair of 5N2s to automatically make an offsite copy of your data. Simple to set up and manage, the reliable DroboDR seamlessly replicates your data to another 5N2 ensuring data availability in case of disaster. Even better, the remote 5N2 stores all user account information so recovery is painless.

Power Protecting Your Critical Data

Power Protecting Your Critical Data

The Drobo 5N2 doesn't just protect from drive failures, it also includes a battery backup system that protects all data in memory or cache. That's right, Enterprise grade data protection for you on your Drobo 5N2! If power spontaneously goes away, the Drobo stays alive long enough for the data to be written to disk, ensuring your important information is always safe. The onboard battery recharges itself and is designed to last for the life of the product.

DroboCare

DroboCare

Our world-class DroboCare support offers powerful protection for all Drobo products. Whether you depend on Drobo for your photo collection or critical business data, our trained professionals are available around the clock to help. In addition to extending technical phone support, DroboCare offers a wide array of benefits over our standard warranty including migration assistance, expedited hardware and rescue kits to ensure you get everything you need, when you need it.


RAID and BeyondRAID ComparsionBeyondRAID:

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

Traditional RAIDDeveloped 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.

how BeyondRAID compares with traditional RAID 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.

Thin Provisioning with Smart Volumes

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, Drobo 5D, and Drobo Mini, 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.

Tiering on Smaller DrobosTiering is for Professionals

While automated data tiering helps IT administrators accelerate business critical applications, it is also ideal for accelerating the applications you need to run faster on YOUR computer too. If you ever wished that database-driven applications such as Aperture, Lightroom, or iTunes were a bit snappier, Drobo is here to help.

Since just a little bit of high-speed flash goes a long way to accelerate your storage, we added an additional drive bay to the Drobo 5D and Drobo Mini. It's called the Drobo Accelerator Bay and it accepts an industry-standard mSATA SSD. Since these very compact SSDs are being used in the new Ultrabook family of portable computers, they are becoming readily available and very affordable. So you can add flash to your Drobo without consuming one of the standard drive bays, which are best used to maximize capacity.

Tiering on Smaller Drobos

On the larger Drobo B1200i, there are enough drive bays to create two tiers of storage while still maintaining high capacity. On 4- and 5-bay Drobo devices, there are not enough bays to create two tiers of storage, so we had to implement tiering differently.

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.

Note: that Data-Aware Tiering is currently available only for the Drobo B1200i, Drobo 5D, and Drobo Mini.

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.

Being Data Aware Diagram

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.

One Pool, Multiple Tiers

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.

Fully Automated Tuning Diagram

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.

Tiering Without SSDs

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 Apps
All File Sharing Drobos support the installation of Drobo Apps - applications that enhance the functionality of your Drobo on your network. Drobo Apps are community created and run on the Linux-based operating system embedded in Drobo.

Drobo Apps range from media servers to web server to network utilities. What you can do with Drobo Apps is endless.

Drobo Dashboard ManagementDrobo 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.

High-Speed Connectivity

The Drobo 5N2 is equipped with dual Gigabit Ethernet ports for network connectivity and makes sharing your data easy by connecting directly to the network. The two ports provide bonding support, also known as Adaptive Link Bonding, for link failover and aggregation without Ethernet switch support. This increases performance and compensates for network connection problems.

The myDrobo Platform

The myDrobo platform extends the functionality of Drobo NAS devices by providing a secure and fully end-to-end encrypted path to selected Drobo Apps.

The iOS and Android app, DroboAccess, allows Drobo NAS owners to access their data anywhere, anytime through a secure and encrypted network. This allows Drobo consumers and SMBs to quickly and easily setup their own private cloud storage solution with the ability to view documents from a web browser or from the DroboAccess mobile app.

DroboPix app allows owners to easily and automatically upload their photos and videos from their Android or iOS device to a network Drobo. The files are automatically uploaded over Wi-Fi and are securely backed up and protected on a Drobo.

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. Drobo 5N2 includes a battery The Next Era of Simplified Storage for Your Connected Home or Small Office that protects all data in memory, or cache, that is, data on its way to the drives. When power spontaneously goes away, the battery keeps the Drobo alive long enough for the data to be written to non-volatile 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.

Mixed Drive Capacity Utilization

Grow storage to meet your data capacity needs with minimal effort. To add capacity, simply insert a new hard disk or replace the smallest disk with a larger one, even when all four disk bays are full. Unlike traditional RAID systems, the BeyondRAID technology enables IT managers to efficiently mix and match disk brands, capacities, and speeds. This allows for continuous expansion as disk capacities grow. Now, expansion is automatic, instantaneous and access to data is always maintained.

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:


Drobo 5N2 Front View
Front View

Drobo 5N2 Rear View
Rear View

Drobo 5N2 Front Open View
Front Open View


Technical Specifications
Connectivity
  • 2 x Gigabit Ethernet port
Drives and Expansion
  • Up to five (5) 3.5″ SATA II/III hard disk drives or solid state drives (sold separately).
  • One (1) mSATA solid state drive in the Drobo Accelerator Bay for increased performance (sold separately).
  • Drives of any manufacturer, capacity, spindle speed, and/or cache can be used. No carriers or tools required. Click here for drive recommendations.
  • Expandable by adding drives or hot-swapping drives with larger ones. Use the Capacity Calculator to estimate available storage in various configurations.
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
  • 64TB filesystem support
Management
  • Drive bay indicator lights, capacity gauge, status lights
  • Drobo Dashboard version 2.6 or later
Operating System Support
  • Apple macOS X 10.10 and higher
  • Microsoft Windows 10
  • Microsoft Windows 8
  • Microsoft Windows 7
Network Protocols
  • Common Internet File System (CIFS) / Server Message Block (SMB)
  • Apple Filing Protocol (AFP)
Hardware Features
  • Carrier-less Drive Bays
  • Power Fail Protection
  • Kensington Lock Port for Security (lock not included)
Additional Software Features
  • Hot Data Caching
  • DroboApps
  • myDrobo compatible
  • Maximum System Capacity: 64TB
  • Drive Spin Down
  • Dim Lights
  • OS X Time Machine Support
  • OS X / macOS Time Machine Support
  • Cloud access
Dimensions
  • Width: 5.9 in (150.3 mm)
  • Height: 7.3 in (185.4 mm)
  • Depth: 10.3 in (262.3 mm)
  • Desktop Form Factor
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, 7A, 84W
  • Dual, fixed, variable speed cooling fans
Environmental Specifications
  • Acoustics - Normal Operation:
  • Operating Temperature: 10°C - 35°C (50° - 95°F)
  • Non-Operating Temperature (storage): -10° - 60°C (14° - 140°F)
  • Operating Humidity: 5% - 80%
Box Contents
  • Drobo 5N2
  • 2x 6 ft (1.8 m) Ethernet cables
  • 6 ft (1.8 m) power cord with power supply
  • Quick Start Card
Warranty
  • Two (2) year warranty

Diagram:

Sample Light Indicators Diagram

Drobo 5N2 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 5N2 Datasheet (.PDF)

Pricing Notes: