Drobo has recently reveled its new hardware product for storage with two Thunderbolt-toting. The external storage units are known as the Drobo 5D and Drobo Mini. The Drobo Mini is a bit interesting one because it fits in a four 2.5-inch drive bays with a special pop-out loading mechanism and a mSATA SSD bay on the underside that enables the new Drobo Accelerator, a caching system for speeding up overall performance.If you look at the back then you will find that there are two Thunderbolt ports, the second for daisy-chaining devices together, along with a USB 3.0 port, making the Drobo Mini the ideal partner to the new MacBook Pro and MacBook Air line-up. Drobo also contains necessary cables for connection and the usual BeyondRAID drive redundancy and auto-repopulation is present onboard.
The Drobo 5D has five 3.5 inch hard drive bays and two Thunderbolt ports, the second for daisy-chaining and a USB 3.0 port, and comes with all the necessary cables. It too gets an mSATA SSD bay for boosting performance, and Drobo says the unit runs quieter than the previous-gen version.
Drobo hasn’t fixed the release dates for these products but the accurate details will be out in July and the pricing is expected to be around $650 and $850 respectively.
