Drobo 5N2 NAS Review

 
Drobo's 5N2 is a well built and compact five bay tower NAS that is mostly of a metal construction hence its impressive 3.9kg (empty) weight. The detachable front bezel plate is made from good quality plastic, has a shiny finger print attracting Piano Black gloss finish and is held in place by magnets.

Apart from the shiny front bezel, the front of the 5N2 is nothing to write home about – that is until you turn the unit on and it suddenly lights up like the proverbial Christmas tree, with all the indicator LEDS going off at once. The front right-hand side of the unit holds a vertical row of drive bay LEDs which glow green, amber or red depending on the what the drives are up to.

At the base of the front panel sits a row of twelve indicator LEDs. The first one is the power mode indicator (green – power on, yellow – standby, red – over temperature) while the last one indicates data transfer activity. The ten in between these two display the percentage of storage space used and these are blue. You can set the brightness levels for the LEDs in the Drobo Dashboard.

The rear of the unit is dominated by the grill for the cooling fan with the only other things on the rear panel being the port for the power adapter, a pair of Ethernet ports (supporting Link Aggregation) and the power button. That rear-mounted power button will soon have you cursing if you have the Drobo on a shelf or in a cupboard.

The Drobo 5N2 still has no ports to connect an external device to so there’s no way to drop data directly off the unit to an external drive for extra security, which is a bit odd for something designed with the small office environment in mind.

 
On the inside of the detachable front bezel, there is a useful little schematic that explains what the drive bay LED indicator colours mean and what, if any, action needs to take place. The five drive bays sit behind the detachable front plate and are tool free.

The bays themselves are protected by sprung doors which are forced up and out of the way by pushing a drive into them. Each bay has a latch to hold the drive in place and support drives up to 10TB in capacity but there’s no form of extra physical security in the way of drive bay locks etc which is something to be mindful of if using the Drobo in an office with a lot of through traffic.

The bays support both 3.5in and 2.5in drives but in the case of 2.5in drives you need to use bay converters. Incidentally, Drobo recommends IcyBox products on their website but we used Startech 25SAT35HDD converters during our tests and they worked perfectly well.

In the base of the 5N2 is what Drobo calls the Accelerator Bay, a compartment that holds an mSATA slot. Access to this compartment is via a small hatch that has a sliding lock to hold in place. Drobo recommends an mSATA drive in the 64GB – 120GB range; going larger provides no real benefit.

At the time of writing the 5N2 does not support SandForce based drives in either the main bays or the Accelerator Bay.

Physical Specifications
Processor: Marvell Armada Quad-core 1.6GHz processor.
Memory: 2GB.
Gigabit Ethernet Ports 2.
Rear panel connectors: 0.
RAID support: none –  BeyondRAID technology.
Cooling: active.
Maximum hard drive size supported: 10TB.
Maximum Capacity: 50TB.
Drive bays: 5.
Tool free bays: Yes.
Other drive bays: 1 x mSATA.
Dimensions (D x W x H):  262.3 x 150.3 x 185.4mm.
Weight (empty): 3.9kg.
Warranty: 2 years.

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