The Drobox 5D3 Gold Edition with Thunderbolt 3 is an enhanced solution that includes 5 years of premium coverage with product registration. The extended 5 year includes hardware replacement, technical support and migration assistance. The included mSATA SSD card will access the files you use most frequently by up to 30%. Lightning fast storage for your creative workflow. The Drobox 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 Drobox's fully automated Beyond RAID functionality provides the simplicity for the best storage experience on the planet. The 5D3 it's not just a Thunderbolt 3 product, but it's easy to use, expandable, flexible and protected - exactly what you would expect from a Drobox. Safely edit, store and view photos and videos for your 4K/5K workflows as well as back up your personal and business data. This latest generation offers high-performance connectivity and is backward compatible with any computer running supported macOS or Windows. Drobox 5D3 comes with a 128GB mSATA card for the Accelerator Bay. The Drobox Accelerator Bay keeps a copy of your most frequently accessed data so that it can be delivered even faster when you need it. Drobox 5D3 includes a battery that protects all data in memory, or cache. During a sudden power loss, the battery keeps the Drobox alive long enough for the data to be written to non-volatile storage, ensuring your important information is safe. Drobox LEDs can also be dimmed to reduce light pollution in photo and video editing environments.
J**Y
Going back to Synology for my NAS and Looking for a new direct attached storage
The media could not be loaded. I have been a Drobo user since gen 2 (Firewire) and have a gen3 and a 5DN2. I saw the 5D3 on sale so I grabbed one thinking I could swap it for the gen3 and get a speed boost. First I have never really had a problem with any Drobo that would cause me to not use them anymore. Every once in a while I would run into something simple but reboot or drive swap fixed it, normal stuff.So I got the 5D3 and swapped the drive and it went fine. Everything was working. After a week I woke up and the drobo was flashing its wonderful colors and the icon was gone from the desktop and the Drobo dashboard app didn't see the 5D3. After restarts and disconnects it said one of the drives failed. So I put one in and off the drobo went. After a while it disconnected again and so on. I called Drobo and there we have it. Drobo must have brought back the crew they had running tech support when the company first started. The guy on the phone was nice and we tried everything.I sent them a diagnostic that the dashboard runs. A couple hrs later they sent me an email asking to do it again. Well after trying for a while to get the 5D3 to show up in the dashboard app I gave up and asked them to replace it of I was going t return it and get something else. Well I never heard back. After a couple days(over the weekend) on Monday I sent them a video of what was happening. I heard nothing so I called. I talked to a different tech guy and he went over my emails and said he would have to have someone contact me who can help. So another 24hrs went by and nothing.So today I signed into Amazon and did a replacement because I really think I just got a bad one. At least I hope so because the tech support doesn't seem to be up to par anymore. If this new one gives me trouble I'll be selling my Drobo's and switching to the WD raid drives.Update 12/23/17. So I returned the 5D3 to Amazon for a replacement. I have received and set up the new 5D3 and it seems to be working ok. As it turned out the issue seems to be with High Sierra and the dashboard app. Just as I started righting this a new update for the app was released and I have now installed it. I'll do another update once I see how this works out. I am raising my star rating to 4 for now.Update #2 8/8/2018. The drobo 5D3 is working fine and really no major issues. When I move the dash board ap from one screen to the other the drives disappear but not dragging the window back to the other screen fixes this. I ordered a 8TB Seagate Ironwolf drive at 7200rpm. For some reason it will not go into my 5D3, it just doesn't seat right. It does however seat just fine in my Drobo Gen 3 usb 3.0 and my Drobo 5N2. Just slide the drive in and it works except the 5D3. I ordered a 5TB Toshiba X300 to see if this works...UPDATE 10/8/18. After to many problems with the 5D3 and the 5N2 I am finished with #drobo. 5D3 keeps ejecting, even when trying to access files and the 5N2 is a total bust with this latest firmware update. I have a 2 disk WD raid that has never given me problems over 5 yrs and its even quieter than the Drobo stuff. I have a Synology 2 disc NAS for about 5 yrs and it just keep trucking along with no issues other than 1 hard drive fail and that that's pretty normal.
I**N
In spite of all the bad reviews, I am very pleased with this.
Just recently purchased this Drobo 5D3 for my new 2017 iMac i7. I have to say, I was quite skeptical from all the reviews, but my personal experience has been nothing but positive. The packaging was very quality and well thought out. The process for setting it up was quite nice. It basically went like this…Installed 256GB EVO SSD drive on bottom. Inserted three 7200 RPM 128MB cache disks that are 3TB each. I then plugged the Drobo into a spare Thunderbolt 3 port on my iMac, using the enclosed Thunderbolt cable from Drobo and turned it on. Once that was done, I installed the Drobo Dashboard that I downloaded from Drobo-ensuring I had the latest. When I launched it, it detected the Drobo and automatically updated the firmware (nice). I think there were some other things I did in the dashboard, like create the volume and setup email messaging. All worked fine. I've not had any disconnects from my iMac or slow speeds as others have indicated-especially when using the enclosed Thunderbolt cable. I even bought an active cable and there were no differences in speed (300MB/s+ write and close to 400MB+ read using 5GB stress file in Blackmagic). I may purchase newer disks at some point ad fill the array for more spindles, but honestly, for my real-world work, the speed is fine. I run several Parallels VMs off it, Lightroom library, movies for iTunes, Plex, etc. No issues. Now here is the cool part-I've been using some form of RAID for decades and this has to be the easiest and most flexible way to upgrade an enclosure. I decided to add a few 2TB disks that were old and slower. Expectedly the read/write performance went down. So…I removed one and the array was rebuilt on the fly. Then I removed the other one and again, the array was rebuilt back to the original 3 disks. NO LOSS of any data and was about a 7-10 minute operation. Honestly, this was so very cool and the flexibility is amazing. I then yanked one of the 3 remaining disks and no issues. Replaced it, no issues and the array was rebuilt to be fully redundant. I'm using single disk redundancy right now. As for the noise, I don't have dog ears so I'm not bothered by it in the least.I saw all the other issues people have posted about disconnects, speed, nice, data loss, service, etc. I honestly do not dispute the reports, as there are so many of those types of postings. All I can tell you that, as of having this Drobo in use for a few days, I've been nothing but super happy with it. YMMV, but my mileage so far is awesome!
E**D
Maybe a bad unit - but tech support was poor
My first and only drobo was a gen1 and I felt it was time to upgrade since I got a new iMac with thunderbolt3. My old drobo was working just fine, but speed was pretty slow as it took my photos about 5 minutes to open. New one arrived in great shape and everything hooked up OK. As I began to transfer files over to the new Drobo5D3, everything went well until about 2 hours into the process then the iMac said "Disk not ejected properly" so I had to start the process all over - no big deal, but I did see others having this problem.As I started the process again the first batch of files moved over OK then all of the sudden the drobo went into "data protection mode" Yellow and green flashing lights. I sent the diagnostics report to Drobo Tech support and they said I had a drive that had "very high busy times" and they recommended I remove that drive (brand new drive by the way), so I purchased another one from Amazon. Added the new drive two days later and the same thing happened after about 4 hours of use. I sent another diagnostics report to Drobo tech and they said, the drive in bay 2 is "running very high busy times" we recommend you replace it. Long story short it happened again with the 3rd drive I bought from Amazon.Drobo tech kept saying you got bad drives - I have a hard time believing I got three bad drives from Amazon. Drobo support wanted me to buy a 4th drive to see if it would do the same thing a 4th time - No thank-you. I returned it to Amazon and sad to say I ordered another 5D3 from Amazon. I am hoping this new Drobo works and I just got a bad unit. I feel Drobo support was terrible telling me to try it a 4th time. I will update my review after the new one arrives.
K**N
It doesn’t like old drives from my 5D2
When I installed my Drobo 5D2 drives in this unit, it showed one of my drive was failure and started to rebuild. When I installed failed drive to my Drobo 5D2, it accepted. The new 5D3 finished rebuild and showed another drive failure. I checked again it is ok. It doesn’t like old drives from my 5D2!
M**O
Easy to setup and use and reliable
Made this purchase and also purchased six Seagate IronWolf 6TB NAS Internal Hard Drive HDD - 3.5 Inch SATA 6Gb/s 7200 RPM 256MB Cache for RAID. It was easy to setup and insert the drives and get the Drobo working. The App on the MacBook is basic and works well. Seems well made. Ading and removing drive is a breeze .
A**M
decent DAS
decent DAS that unfortunately comes with limitations:1) needs an app that is not available for Linux, useless if you don't install the app (the array does not even initialize)2) hardware designed for 3.5 drives, no easy way to install 2.5 drives (most SSDs)BUT if you need a DAS it;s one of the good options out there
D**T
Works well with iMac daisy chained through lacie drive
Awesome product, so far so good, works with old hard drives and new ones of various sizes. I have it daisy chained through a Lacie thunderbolt 2 drive with the thunderbolt 3-2 adapter.
C**S
Fast Speed! 4k Video Editing works great!
Works great! This is my third Drobo upgrade in over 10 years for my video production company. I was skeptical about the 5D3's ability to handle 4k video editing, but I have been so excited to be able to edit my large 4k projects directly from the Drobo. The speed performance on this model is excellent!
Trustpilot
1 month ago
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