Drobo Announces 5D, Utilizes Thunderbolt, USB 3, and SSD Drives

We’ll admit it, we love us some Drobo here at MacTrast! Now Drobo has given us more to love, with the announcement of the impending release of the Drobo 5D. With Thunderbolt and USB 3.0 connectivity, using solid state drives (SSDs), Drobo claims the 5D is the highest-performing personal storage array on the planet.

From Drobo’s website:

Drobo 5D is equipped with dual Thunderbolt ports for daisy chaining. Connect up to six Thunderbolt devices and/or a non-Thunderbolt monitor at the end of the chain. With six Drobo 5D arrays in a chain, you can have up to 96 TB of usable capacity. And, the bi-directional 10 Gbps performance of Thunderbolt allows all devices in the chain to achieve maximum throughput.

The 5D uses something called Data-Aware Tiering technology, it intelligently uses the high-performance flash in SSDs to accelerate performance of the storage array, allowing applications such as Adobe Premiere and Apple Aperture fast access to data. The Drobo Accelerator Bay also accepts an industry-standard mSATA SSD, leaving all five 3.5” drives bays available for high-capacity HDDs. Drobo says if you want the fastest performance available, you can load up all the drive bays with SSDs.

Another feature that caught my eye is that the Drobo 5D includes a battery that protects all data in memory, or cache, that is, data on its way to the drives. If a power outage occurs, the battery will keep the Drobo alive long enough for the data to be written to the drives, ensuring that your data has been saved. Drobo states the battery recharges itself and is designed to last for the life of the product.

I, for one, am looking forward to seeing this one in action. A release date hasn’t been set, but we’ll be sure to let you know when this baby is released.

For more information about the Drobo 5D, and to be notified when it’s released, visit the Drobo website.