Specification Sheet

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Drobo Data Sheet | Drobo 5D3
Drobo 5D3
The Drobo 5D3 is the 3rd generation 5 Bay
Direct Attached Storage reimagined for media
professionals, content creators, and small
businesses. Lightning fast Thunderbolt™ 3
technology delivers the speed, and Drobo’s fully
automated BeyondRAID™ functionality provides
the simplicity for the best storage experience on
the planet.
Not only is the 5D3 fast, but it’s easy to use,
expandable, flexible and protected – exactly
what you would expect from a Drobo. You can
safely edit, store and view photos and videos for
your 4K/5K workflows, as well as back up your
personal and business data.
Data Protection and Expandability
Made Simple
Built on award-winning BeyondRAID™
technology with single- or dual-drive
redundancy, Drobo 5D3 protects your data
without any user interaction, even in the event
of multiple drive failures.
Drives can be added or 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 tell you what to do. Just
add a drive in an empty bay or remove a smaller
drive and replace it with a larger one.
Power of Thunderbolt 3 and
Flexibility of USB Type-C
Thunderbolt 3 technology provides performance
that’s twice as fast as the previous generation,
Drobo 5D. This optimizes your performance
when transferring large volumes of data.
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. Supports one 5K
monitor display or two 4K monitors. By having
5D3 arrays in a chain, you can have up to 300
TB of usable capacity and achieve throughput by
enabling the bi-directional 40 Gb/s performance
of Thunderbolt 3.
Drobo is the only 5 bay direct attached storage
array that offers Thunderbolt 3 and USB 3.0
Type-C. This latest generation also offers
high-performance connectivity and is backward
compatible with any computer running supported
versions of Mac OS X or Windows.
Enhanced Time Machine Support
Drobo is compatible with Apple’s Time Machine,
which will consume the capacity of an external
storage system. By utilizing the Drobo Dashboard,
you can simply allocate capacity limits for
backups and data storage.
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 can dramatically speed
up loading large photo libraries and other I/O
intensive operations, smoothing out workflows
allowing you to optimize productivity.
Power Protecting Your Critical Data
Drobo doesn’t just protect you from a drive
failure, but also from potential data loss after
a power outage. Often found only in arrays
that cost tens of thousands of dollars, Drobo
5D3 includes a battery that protects all data in
memory, or cache, that is, data on its way to the
drives.
During a sudden power loss, the internal battery
keeps the Drobo alive long enough for the data
to be written to nonvolatile storage. The battery
recharges itself and lasts for the life of the
product.
Lightning Fast Storage for Your Creative Workflow
Drobo Dashboard
Drobo Dashboard is the single tool used to
centrally manage all of your Drobo devices.
Drobo Dashboard displays status as if all
of your Drobos were right in front of you
with the same status lights and capacity
gauge that are on the front panel. All
administration tasks are a single click away.
Designed for You
Drobo devices have always been space efficient
and the Drobo 5D3 is no exception. It is designed
to provide high capacity, without taking up a
lot of your valuable desk space. It is compact
because of Drobo’s unique carrier-less drive bay
design, allowing drives to be installed very close
to each other. Includes Thunderbolt 3 cable.
*Laptops and computers with Thunderbolt 2
ports will require a Thunderbolt 3 (USB-C) to
Thunderbolt 2 adapter.