Drobo 5C USB Type-C DAS Review

As the Drobo 5C doesn’t use RAID arrays in the traditional sense, relying instead on the company's BeyondRAID technology, we used sets of disks to test its performance.

Disk set 1 (mixed)
1 x 6TB Toshiba X300, 1 x 4TB Toshiba X300, (7,200rpm 128MB cache) 2 x 2TB Toshiba P300, 1 x 1TB Toshiba P300 (7,200rpm 64MB cache)

Disk set 2 (standard KitGuru test drives)
5 x WD 6TB Red (5,400rpm, 64MB cache)

Disk set 3 SSD (using Startech 25SAT35HDD drive bay converters)
3 x 960GB Samsung 845DC EVO, 1 x 1TB Samsung 850  PRO, 1 x  1TB Crucial M550

Software:
Atto Disk Benchmark.
CrystalMark 3.0.3.
IOMeter

To test real life file/folder performance we use a number of different file/folder combinations to test the read and write performance of the NAS device.  Using the FastCopy utility to get a MB/s and time taken for each transfer, the data is written from and read back to a 240GB SSD.
60GB Steam folder: 29,521 files.
50GB Files folder: 28,523  files.
12GB Movie folder: 24 files – mix of Blu-ray and 4K files.
10GB Photo folder: 621 files – mix of .png, .raw and .jpeg images.
10GB Audio folder: 1,483 files – mix of .mp3 and .flac files.

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