Drobo 5N 5-Bay NAS Review

Setup – Logged-in View and Settings

Okay, enough of how it looks when we aren’t logged in – it is time to take a look at the rest and all the things Drobo has to offer. After logging in with our admin user, the first page that we had a look at changes a bit. We see that login link disappears, the lock icon gets unlocked, and we see all the details including serial number.

Further, you can install a lot of extra function in the form of Drobo apps. We have the basic Drobo features such as myDrobo and DroboAccess for easy connection to the system and DroboPix which allows us an easy backup of our pictures from our Android or iOS devices. Keep all the memories synced and backed up in a safe and private place. There are a lot more apps to choose from, but we’ll get to that later.

On the tool page we can tell the Drobo 5N to turn itself off or restart, should we need that. We can also turn the lights on or reset the device from here as well as manage updates. Updates can be installed manually or automatically.

There aren’t many settings as such available, but those that are there are useful and they’re divided into four sub-groups. We can choose whether we want a single disk redundancy (default) or if we want to increase it to two. Two disk redundancy will give you less available space, but it will also give you a better safety against disk failure – whether one or two disks can fail without risk to your data.

The disk spindown is a feature that we can turn off, should we need to. In some rare cases, some apps will time out if they have to wait for a sleeping disk to spin up. Modern apps have no problem with this, but it’s a great feature to be able to turn off in order to stay compatible with legacy software too. The good thing about spindown is, that you’ll save a lot of power when the drives aren’t being actively used. Power is money, and money saved is something we all like.

The last function in the general settings is for the LED lights on the device. We can dim them in ten steps and set them to a level where they’re visible where we placed the system without them being annoyingly bright or distract you from the side.

Next up are the Network settings. We can change the name of the device and the workgroup it belongs to. We can also manually change the frame size up to 9000 from the default 1500 should our network be configured that way. Naturally, we’re also able to change how the NAS will get its IP address, by DHCP or manual settings.

Sadly we can’t change the DNS settings when it’s set to DHCP which is something that could be troublesome in rare instances. However, for 99.9% of cases, this shouldn’t be a problem.

The admin settings don’t feature much. We can change the admin username away from the default Admin and change the password too. We can also disable the usage of third party apps in general on the system while still being able to access the official Drobo apps.

Last but not least within the settings, we have the alert settings where we can configure how the device is able to send out alert emails and what level of alerts we want to receive – from critical only to all useful information.

Above we saw that we can change the disk redundancy amount and we do so, the system will start to rebuild the array. While that is going on, we can’t replace any drives as the system is busy moving files around to ensure that your drive security is running. Not to worry though, it didn’t take much more than an hour to do so in my tests and then it was ready again.

The Dashboard app also shows us that this is in progress with the orange lid up drive icons, a warning msg under health, and a warning message at the bottom of the dashboard. The NAS itself will also switch its LEDs to orange, warning you that this is going on. Once it’s done, it will all turn to green again.