Drobo has released five new products in the past year and shows no signs of slowing down. The newest entry to the list is a direct-attached storage system that features five 3.5-inch drive bays and a special mSATA slot for SSD cache. The real performance increase comes from the available bandwidth back to the host system.
The Drobo 5Dt increases performance with two Thunderbolt 2 (20 Gbps) connections. Thunderbolt allows products to be daisy chained using cables connected from one device to the next. The interface is capable of delivering high storage throughput performance and still carry a 4K video signal to a monitor.
The system also features a single USB 3.0 (5 Gbps) connection for legacy devices, as many home computers still don't have support for Thunderbolt technology. The high speed interface allows the system to increase burst and large sequential file performance that's available from Drobo's BeyondRAID architecture.
The Drobo 5D series has been the go-to-product for users who need to travel with large capacity, high-bandwidth storage. Giving users the ability to connect the system over two interfaces increases the number of systems with which the 5Dt is compatible.
The Drobo 5Dt is available today at the Drobo Store for $899.99 (diskless). Drobo also offers the system fully configured with hard disk drives for an additional fee. Options range from 15TB ($1,549) to 30TB ($2,999). All of the configurations include a 128GB mSATA SSD for improved performance. Drobo claimed the SSD delivers up to a 3x performance increase. The systems ships with three years of DroboCare warranty coverage standard.
As mentioned, Drobo has released several new product in the past year. The company has also increased the software capabilities of the network-attached storage products like 5N and B810n. We expect to see even more products released in the coming months as Drobo continues to update the entire product line. Some big announcements should arrive later this year.
Chris Ramseyer is a Contributing Editor for Tom's Hardware, covering Storage. Follow him on Twitter and Facebook.
