Drobo 5N2 NAS Review

As the Drobo 5N2 doesn't support RAID in the conventional sense, we made up three disk sets to test it with. Drobo supplied two Seagate drives with the unit so we added another three random disks ( 1 x  WD Red 6TB, 1 x WD Red 8TB and 1 x Seagate IronWolf 10TB) to show the flexibility of the BeyondRAID technology. We tested each disk set in the default Single Disk Redundancy mode and again in the optional Dual Disk Redundancy Mode using a single Ethernet connection.

Disk Set 1 – 5 x HDD mix
1 x Seagate NAS 3TB (ST3000VN000, 5,900rpm 64MB cache)
1 x Seagate Desktop 4TB (ST4000DM00, 5,900rm, 64MB cache)
1 x  WD Red 6TB (WD60EFRX, 5,400rpm 128MB cache)
1 x WD Red 8TB (WD80EFZX 5,400rpm 128MB cache)
1 x Seagate IronWolf 10TB (ST10000VN004, 7,200rpm, 256MB cache)
Disk Set 2 –  5 x HDD same drives
5 x WD Red 6TB (WD60EFRX, 5,400rpm 128MB cache)
Disk Set 3  – 4 x SSD mix (using Startech 25SAT35HDD bay converters)
3 x Samsung SSD845DC 960GB (MZ-7GE960EW)
1 x Crucial MX300 2TB (CT2050MX300SSD1)

Software:
Atto Disk Benchmark.
CrystalMark 3.0.3.
IOMeter.
Intel NASPT.

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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