Drobo 5c 5-Bay USB Type-C Self-Managing DAS Review

Final Thoughts: Pricing and Conclusion

Pricing

At the time of writing, the Drobo 5c can be yours for as little as $349.00 on Amazon US and £364.25 on Amazon UK. There are also several drive-equipped versions available that come with up to 40TB capacity out of the box.

Overview

The Drobo 5c is a perfect companion for anyone that needs a lot of external capacity hooked up to their system and want to do so without the need for big configurations or knowledge. Thanks to the clever systems, the Drobo 5c is self-managing. It still offers flexibility in the redundancy with either a one or two drive redundancy.

The ability to mix and match drives as you like and still retain the full functionality and maximum possible capacity is another awesome feature that comes along with every Drobo unit. The 5C also has these features along with the built-in battery backup and flash memory that secures any data in transfer in case of a power outage.

While the unit comes with a Type-C USB port, it’s only USB 3.0 generation and not the faster USB 3.1 Gen.2. Still, it’s plenty for the given performance and throughput and the connector won’t bottleneck in any way. The classic desktop tower design allows for versatile placement and the encasing is both durable and beautiful thanks to the metal used. It also comes with a built-in silent fan, so you don’t need to worry about drives running hot – even during prolonged usage.

The Drobo 5c also allows you to set up a second partition for system recovery and time machine usage. And yes, it supports both HFS+ and NTFS as the file system. Overall, a complete solution that is as easy to set up as possible while still providing enterprise-class protection with battery backup and dual-disk redundancy. That’s awesome.

Pros:

• Five drive bays to mix and match drives
• BeyondRAID for maximum capacity and redundancy
• Built-in battery and crash memory backup
• Simple to use thanks to self-management
• Good looking tower design
• Backup partition feature, compatible with Time Machine

Cons:

• Fewer user choices, if that is a con at all.

“The Drobo 5c is probably the simplest and easiest way to extend your storage externally with redundancy and flexibility.”

Thank you Drobo for providing us with this review sample.