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Drobo 8D
The Power to Transform Your Storage Workflow


Drobo 8D

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

Overview:

Transform your storage workflow. Meet the bigger, better, bolder Drobo 8D. At a 128TB volume size, the Drobo 8D is designed to meet the need for data intensive workflows. With lightning speed Thunderbolt 3, the Drobo 8D is the fastest direct attached Drobo yet. The Drobo 8D is the only Drobo with the Intelligent Volume Management, which allows for the flexibility of manual and automated management of storage pools.

Creative professionals will experience the editing power for media rich, high resolution workflows with the protection of Drobo’s patented BeyondRAID technology. The 8D is also ideal as primary storage for SMBs requiring reliable, easy to use, high capacity solutions.

This latest direct attached solution offers high-performance connectivity and is backward compatible with any computer running supported macOS. Drobo 8D comes with an Accelerator Bay in a rear mounted slot for an SSD (not included) to enable the patented Drobo Accelerator Cache technology. The Drobo Hot Data Cache keeps a copy of your most frequently accessed transactional data so that it can be delivered even faster when you need it. Drobo 8D includes a battery that protects all data in flight. During a sudden power loss, the battery keeps the Drobo functioning long enough for the data to be written to non-volatile storage (written to an included internal SSD storage device), ensuring your important information is always safe. Drobo LEDs can also be dimmed to reduce light pollution in photo and video editing environments.

Leave Your Limitations Behind… Go BeyondRAID

Built on our award-winning BeyondRAID technology, the Drobo B810i 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.

The Fastest Drobo Yet With Thunderbolt 3 Speed


Bigger. Better. Bolder.

The Fastest Drobo Yet With Thunderbolt 3 Speed

Meet the bigger, better, and bolder Drobo 8D. Capable of supporting 16 volumes of up to 128TB, with a total storage pool of 256TB, 8D is designed to meet the need for data-intensive workflows. With lightning speed ThunderboltTM 3, the Drobo 8D is the fastest direct attached Drobo yet. The 8D comes equipped with a Drobo Accelerator Bay, and is the only Drobo with the new Intelligent Volume Management technology.

SSD Accelerated PerformanceSSD Acceleration Boosts Performance

Most storage arrays use either all hard drives or all SSDs. The Drobo 8D delivers the best of both worlds by intelligently combining hard drives and SSDs to deliver both capacity and performance. The Drobo 8D gives you the option to enable Hot Data Caching through the Drobo Accelerator Bay on the rear slot. Using an SSD allows access to most frequently read data to deliver blazing fast speeds. This boosts performance of popular applications such as Apple’s Final Cut and Adobe Lightroom.

SSDs can also be utilized in the front bays of the Drobo 8D for Data-Aware Tiering, allowing for transactional data to migrate to the SSDs. This ensures that both writes and reads are accelerated.

Intelligent Volume Management

Intelligent Volume Management

New to the Drobo product line is the Intelligent Volume Management technology available on the 8D. This technology combines the flexibility of manual volume configuration with the convenience of Drobo’s legendary automation, allowing for separation of file systems as customer needs dictate. The 8D allows the creation of up to 16 volumes with a maximum 128TB volume size, and a 256TB storage pool.

Power of Thunderbolt 3
Power of Thunderbolt 3

Drobo 8D storage array offers a lightning fast ThunderboltTM 3 connection (macOS only) that is both fast and backwards compatible. This optimizes your performance when transferring large volumes of data. With the dual ports, the Drobo 8D connects up to six Thunderbolt devices or five devices and a monitor at the end of the chain. Supports one 5K or two 4K displays (with a Thunderbolt dock).


Enhanced Backup for Time Machine

Enhanced Backup for Time Machine

Time Machine and Drobo: A Perfect Pairing
Apple’s Time Machine was designed to make backing up your files simple and painless. Pairing Time Machine with Drobo improves your data protection by ensuring your data is safe in the event of hard drive failure.

Control How Much Storage Time Machine Uses
Apple’s guidelines are to set the storage space for Time Machine at twice the size of the Mac’s hard drive that is to be protected. Time Machine users know that it will gradually use all available disk space without an easy way to stop this from happening. With Drobo you can easily control the maximum storage space available for Time Machine backups through Drobo Dashboard. When you install a Drobo, Drobo Dashboard prompts to see if you want to create a dedicated storage volume for Time Machine’s use, allowing you to set the size of this volume.

Power Protecting Your Critical Data
Power Protecting Your Critical Data

In addition to drive failure protection, Drobo also protects against potential data loss during a power outage. In every Drobo we include battery backup technology to protect data in memory or cache. When power spontaneously goes away, Drobo moves any in-flight data to onboard flash in your Drobo, so it will be protected and moved to your disk drives once power is restored. This ensures your important information is safe and sound. Even better, your battery recharges itself and is designed to last for the life of your Drobo.

DroboCare

DroboCare

DroboCare extends beyond Standard Hardware Warranty, providing you with additional peace of mind. If an issue occurs, we will immediately send you a replacement Drobo and pay for shipping both ways.

*Please note that DroboCare does not cover failed hard drives.


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

ThunderboltThunderbolt 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.

Thunderbolt 3 cablesWhat 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.

Thunderbolt 3  Charts

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.

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:

Features DrivesDesign
All Drobos have carrier-less drive insertion. This means there are no special parts or screws that have to be added to the drives before they are inserted. It's like inserting a cassette tape into a video recorder.

Drobo model 8D is designed to be rack mounted, but it is also compact and quiet, making it ideal for workgroup environments that need storage located in an office or on a desk.

Even the faceplate is magnetic, with the manual is on the back. Primary management is by using status lights and visual capacity gauge.

And, all Drobos look good too!

Drobo actions required by status lights manual on the backBeyondRAID 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 ManagementDrobo Dashboard Management
Drobo Dashboard is an easy-to-use administration tool to centrally manage all your Drobos. It displays the status of all of your Drobos as if they were right in front of you. In fact, it provides the same status lights and storage capacity usage gauge that are on the front panel of each of your Drobos. So wherever you are, you can check the health of all your disk drives and know that Drobo has your back, keeping all your data safe. Plus the dashboard handles all administration tasks simply and easily without you needing to become a storage expert. Quite simply, this is the easiest way to configure and manage business-class storage

Learn more about Drobo Dashboard.

Smart Volumes and Thin Provisioning
The Drobo 8D features Intelligent Volume Management, the flexibility of manual volume management and the convenience of automated volume management. The 8D allows for the creation of 16 volumes with up to 128TB, with a total storage pool of 256TB. The 8D allows the creation of up to 16 volumes with a maximum 128TB volume size.

Thunderbolt TechnologyThunderbolt 3 Technology
Thunderbolt 3 technology provides lightning fast speed. This optimizes your performance when transferring large volumes of data. Drobo 8D is equipped with dual Thunderbolt 3 ports for daisy chaining. Connects up to six Thunderbolt devices or five devices and a monitor at the end of the chain. Supports one 5K monitor display or two 4K monitors. By having 8D arrays in a chain, you can have up to 588 TB of usable capacity and achieve throughput by enabling the bi-directional 40 Gbps performance of Thunderbolt 3.

Hybrid Storage and Tiering
The Drobo 8D moves beyond manually tuning an array for applications that have different storage requirements. Its ability to automatically tier frequently used transactional data from stored data that's seldom used enables businesses to consolidate storage resources, and share that storage across all connected clients and their applications.

When using the hybrid storage option, Drobo's Data-Aware Tiering leverages high-capacity hard disk drives (HDDs) for bulk storage, and high-performance solid state drives (SSDs) for both read and write acceleration. Drobo 8D can use the same SSDs to deliver both a Data-Aware Transactional Tier and Hot Data cache at the same time. The result is fast redundant storage with a fast read cache for an application-optimized solution that requires no manual tuning.

Data Protection and Expandability
Built on award-winning BeyondRAID technology with single- or dual-drive redundancy, Drobo 8D 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.

Intelligent Volume Management
The Drobo 8D features Intelligent Volume Management, the flexibility of manual volume management and the convenience of automated volume management. The 8D allows for the creation of 16 volumes with up to 128TB, with a total storage pool of 256TB. The 8D allows the creation of up to 16 volumes with a maximum 128TB volume size.

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

Capacity and Performance
Drobo 8D comes with an Accelerator Bay in a rear mounted slot for an SSD to enable the patented Drobo Accelerator Cache technology. The Drobo Hot Data Cache keeps a copy of your most frequently accessed transactional data so that it can be delivered at blazing -fast speeds, and dramatically accelerates loading large photo libraries and other I/O intensive operations. Optimize your productivity by smoothing out your workflow. SSDs can also be utilized in the front bays of the Drobo 8D for Data-Aware Tiering, allowing for transactional data to migrate to the SSDs. This ensures that both writes and reads are accelerated.

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 8D 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
Utilizing dual-disk redundancy, 8D model's BeyondRAID technology can ensure your data is safe even if up to two drives fail simultaneously - all without a moment of downtime. You can even switch between single- and dual-disk redundancy with a single click. You'll feel safer knowing that if drives do fail, Drobo 8D model automatically enters a state of self-healing in which it relays out your data across the remaining healthy drives and sectors. If a drive fails, BeyondRAID technology always returns the drive array back to the safest state possible.

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, say, 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 remove the need to manually expand/contract the file system as more space becomes available or is removed.

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 Re-ordering
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 them in the exact same order. When you remove your disks from 8D model, you can put them back in any order you like.

DroboCare
Drobo products are engineered to the highest standards, but occasionally something goes wrong and that's when we kick into high gear. DroboCare is simple, powerful protection for your Drobo storage. The DroboCare support program extends your peace of mind beyond the standard warranty term and the phone support included with your Drobo purchase. DroboCare gives you more, even during your standard warranty period.

Specifications:


Drobo 8D Front View
Front View

Drobo 8D Rear View
Rear View


Rack Mount (sold separately)
Rack Mount (sold separately)


Technical Specifications
Connectivity
  • 2 x Thunderbolt 3 ports; second port for daisy chaining Thunderbolt devices, including one 5K or two 4K displays (macOS only)
Drives and Expansion
  • Up to eight (8) 3.5”SATA hard disk drives or solid state drives (sold separately)
  • One (1) 2.5” 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.
  • 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 Tiering
  • Drive Re-ordering
Management
  • Drive bay indicator lights, capacity gauge, status lights
  • Drobo Dashboard version 3.3.0 or later
Operating System Support
  • Apple macOS 10.12 and higher
File Systems Supported
  • macOS: HFS+
Hardware Features
  • Carrier-less drive bays
  • Power fail protection with internal battery
  • Metal chassis and cover
  • Rear slot for 2.5” SATA SSD
  • Hybrid Storage
  • Automated Data-Aware Tiering
  • Kensington Lock Port for security (lock not included)
Additional Software Features
  • Hot Data Caching
  • Maximum System Capacity: 128TB
  • Drive Spin Down
  • Dim Lights
  • macOS Time Machine Support
  • Intelligent Volume Management
Power and Cooling
  • Internal Power Supply:
    • AC Input - 100-240VAC~3.5A, 50-60Hz
    • DC Output - 12V, 20.8A, 250W max
  • Dual, fixed cooling fans
  • 15W of power to slow charge a Thunderbolt 3 laptop
Dimensions
  • Desktop Form Factor
  • Width: 12.17 in (309.1 mm)
  • Height: 5.46 in (138.7 mm)
  • Depth: 14.1 in (358.1 mm)
Weight
  • 16 lb 4 oz (7.4 kg) without hard drives, or packaging
Environmentals
  • Acoustics
  • Normal Operation: 30.4 dB
  • Operating Temperature: 10°C - 35°C (50° - 95°F)
  • Non-Operating Temperature (storage): -10°- 60°C (14° - 140°F)
  • Operating Humidity: 5% - 80%
Certifications
  • Environmental: RoHS,
  • Regulatory Compliance for US, Canada, EU, Australia/New Zealand, Japan, and Korea: FCC Part 15 Subpart B; ICES-003 Issue 6; EN 55024, EN55032,
  • EN61000-3-2; EN61000-3-3; AS/NZS CISPR 32; VCCI-CISPR 32-2016; KN32; KN 35
  • Safety: UL, CB, CAN/CSA-22.2 No. 60950-1
Warranty
  • Two (2) year warranty

Box Contents

Box Contents

  • Drobo 8D
  • 3.3 ft (1 m) Thunderbolt 3 cable
  • 6 ft (1.8 m) power cord

Diagram:

Sample Light Indicators 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:

Drobo 8D Datasheet (.PDF)

Pricing Notes:

  • All Prices are Inclusive of GST
  • Pricing and product availability subject to change without notice.