Lightning Fast Storage for Media Professionals, Content Creators, and Small Businesses

The Drobo 5D3 is the 3rd generation 5 Bay direct-attached storage (DAS), reimagined for media professionals, content creators, and small businesses. Lightning fast Thunderbolt™ 3 technology delivers the speed, while Drobo’s fully automated BeyondRAID™ functionality provides the simplicity. Not only is the 5D3 fast, but it’s easy to use, expandable, flexible and protected. You can safely edit, store and view photos and videos in your 4K/5K workflow, as well as backup your personal and business data.

Leave Your Limitations Behind… Go BeyondRAID®

Built on award-winning BeyondRAID™ technology, Drobo 5D3 simply protects your data against a single or dual disk drive failure.

Drives can be added, hot-swapped and updated in real time for storage expansion with zero downtime. If you’re running low on space, the lights on the front provide guidance. Just add a drive in an empty bay, or remove a smaller drive and replace it with a larger one. In addition, Smart Volumes™ are thinly provisioned volumes, that automatically utilize capacity as needed from a common pool of storage.

Enhanced Backup for Time Machine

Apple’s Time Machine was designed to make backing up your files simple and painless. Pairing Time Machine with Drobo improves your data protection by ensuring your data is safe in the event of hard drive failure.

Control How Much Storage Time Machine Uses

Apple’s guidelines are to set the storage space for Time Machine at twice the size of the Mac’s hard drive that is to be protected. Time Machine users know that it will gradually use all available disk space without an easy way to stop this from happening. With Drobo you can easily control the maximum storage space available for Time Machine backups through Drobo Dashboard. When you install a Drobo, Drobo Dashboard prompts to see if you want to create a dedicated storage volume for Time Machine’s use, allowing you to set the size of this volume.

Compact, Expandable Design

Expanding your storage capacity with a Drobo couldn’t be easier. There’s no long, risky process to add capacity to a Drobo – no need to go through the time consuming and complex administration of destroying your RAID sets and recreating with larger drives; and then finally restoring from your backup. When it’s time to add storage capacity to a Drobo, simply insert additional disk drives or replace the smallest disks with larger ones. The unique compact, carrier-less drive-bay design results in an attractive, efficient storage array that won’t dominate your valuable desk space.

If you’re running low on space, the lights on the front of the Drobo 5D3 provide guidance. The innovative, user-friendly design allows you to add or hot-swap larger capacity drives, without tools, for storage expansion with zero downtime. Simply expand storage, while safely storing and backing up your personal data with ease of use and peace of mind.

Capacity and Performance

Drobo 5D3 includes a built-in Accelerator Bay, with an mSATA card holder (mSATA card not included). Our patented, Accelerator Cache technology keeps a copy of your most frequently accessed data to deliver blazing-fast speeds. The accelerator cache will dramatically speed up loading large photo libraries and other I/O intensive operations, smooth out your workflow and optimize your productivity.

To keep capacity of your Drobo 5D3 at a maximum, the Drobo Accelerator Bay accepts an industry-standard mSATA SSD, leaving all five 3.5” drives bays available for high-capacity HDDs. For the fastest performance possible, you can also load up every drive bay with SSDs. Drobo 5D3 gives you the flexibility to choose!

Connectivity Without Compromise

Drobo 5D3 is equipped with dual, Thunderbolt 3 ports for daisy chaining. Connect up to six Thunderbolt devices and/or a non-Thunderbolt monitor at the end of the chain. 5D3 supports one, 5K monitor display or two, 4K monitors. With multiple 5D3 arrays in a chain, you can have up to 300 TB of usable capacity and achieve maximum throughput by enabling the bi-directional 40 Gb/s performance of Thunderbolt 3. This latest generation Drobo also offers high-performance connectivity and is backward compatible with any computer running supported versions of Mac OS X or Windows.

Power Protecting Your Critical Data

In addition to drive failure protection, Drobo also protects against potential data loss during a power outage. In every Drobo we include battery backup technology to protect data in memory or cache. When power spontaneously goes away, Drobo moves any in-flight data to onboard flash in your Drobo, so it will be protected and moved to your disk drives once power is restored. This ensures your important information is safe and sound. Even better, your battery recharges itself and is designed to last for the life of your Drobo.

Please note: Images for illustration purposes only. HDDs/SSDs not included, sold separately.

Connectivity

• 2 x Thunderbolt 3 ports; second port for daisy chaining Thunderbolt devices, including 5K and dual 4K displays (Mac OS X only)
• 1 x USB 3.0, Type-C port

Drives and Expansion

• Up to five (5) 3.5" SATA II/III hard disk drives or solid state drives (sold separately).
• Drobo Accelerator Bay for increased performance with one (1) mSATA solid state drive (card sold separately).
• Drives of any manufacturer, capacity, spindle speed, and/or cache can be used. No carriers or tools required.
• Expandable by adding drives or hot-swapping drives with larger ones.

BeyondRAID Features

• Thin Provisioning
• Instant Expansion
• Mixed Drive Size Utilization
• Automatic Protection Levels
• Single – or Dual-Disk Redundancy
• Virtual Hot Spare
• Data Aware
• Drive Re-ordering

Management

• Drive bay indicator lights, capacity gauge, status lights
• Drobo Dashboard version 3.1.1 or later

Operating System Support

• Apple® Macintosh® macOS 10.10 and higher
• Microsoft® Windows® 10
• Microsoft® Windows® 8
• Microsoft® Windows® 7
• File System Options
• Apple® macOS: HFS+
• Microsoft® Windows: NTFS

Hardware Features

• Carrier-less Drive Bays
• Power Fail Protection with Internal Battery
• Metal Chassis and Cover
• Kensington Lock Port for Security (lock not included)
• Additional Software Features
• Hot Data Caching
• Maximum System Capacity: 64TB
• Drive Spin Down
• Dim Lights
• macOS Time Machine Support