Drobo 5N2 5-Bay Self-Managing NAS Review

Setup: Storage, Shares, & Users

While the Drobo 5N2 is busy initializing the drive, we can continue to have a look around within the Dashboard. Not all function are available yet, but they will be shortly.

The general overview of Drobo devices has two view modes, icons and a list. The devices can be sorted by health, name, or product, and the Dashboard will find both local DAS devices as well as NAS devices such as the one I’m testing today.

The list view shows more details of every found device, including total capacity, space used, free space, serial number, and the login state. You can also quickly glance the overall health state by the light; if it is green like here, everything is in order.

Selecting a device will allow you to view more details as well as configure it. The first pieces of information that you’ll find are the system’s own. This includes the health, firmware, uptime, and active connection. The representation of the NAS is also a live view that will indicate if there should be trouble with any of the drives.

Speaking of drives, you can view all the installed drive’s information too. Drive serial, health, capacity, and type is all shown here.

The network information is very similar to the disk information, except it is for the two Gigabit Ethernet ports. It will show the connection status, IP and MAC address, as well as the gateway and DNS servers.

Until the unit has finished the drive initialisation, you won’t get access to much more. But don’t worry, it really doesn’t take long. Go and make a coffee and a cheese toast and it should be done when you get back.

The capacity view has two modes too, just as the initial device view. You can watch it as a pie chart that will give you a quick view on the capacity.

The usage view delivers a greater detail on how your storage pool is allocated and used.

By default, there is one share already created when the system initializes and that is for public files that you don’t mind anyone having access to. But I doubt that’s enough for you, so we will add some more.

To set up our users and shares, we need to enable users and for that, we need to log in. We haven’t set a new admin password yet, so we’ll do that first. The admin settings are also where we can enable or disable Drobo Apps globally.

Now that we have set up our admin user and are fully logged into the NAS with all privileges, we can manage the rest. Selecting a share will allow you to access the settings. From here you can quickly define user’s access to specific folders. You can deny access, set read access, and full read-write access.

Adding a new shared folder is as easy as entering a name for it. You can optionally enable Time Machine support for the share and define the maximum size for the Time Machine backups.

Creating users is just as easy as shares with the addition that you also have to provide a password. Both users and shares are conveniently placed within the same menu, allowing you to switch between the two as you need.

Clicking the icon in front of a share will cycle the access rights.

Mounting drives on your systems is as convenient as the rest. You don’t need to dig through your network settings or neighbourhood in order to mount your shares as drives. The Drobo Dashboard can do it for you.

I seriously love how easy it is to set this NAS up. You don’t need any particular skills or knowledge as long as you’re able to read and navigate in an application.