Drobo 8D Review – A Massive, Speedy, Thunderbolt 3 Powerhouse of Storage

Drobo.com

The Drobo 8D is a massive powerhouse, beautifully and solidly designed. Sleek, sharp and a quietly keeping all your data and drives backed up safely. According to Drobo, this is the fastest Drobo Yet With Thunderbolt 3 Speed. Its has multiple options and very expansive in the number of drives and even SSD port plugin, in the back. In reviewing the Drobo we were amazed at its performance and features. It’s quiet, efficient and with 2 Thunderbolt 3 ports, you can actually daisy chain multiple Drobos for a massive grouping of backup.

This is optimum for any photographer, videographer, data keeper or anyone who just has a ton of data they want secure. It performed impeccably for us. The lights that softly glow give you data on how the drives are performing and what the unit is doing along with the simple and efficient software of the Drobo Dashboard overseeing all operations.

It will support 16 volumes of up to 128TB, with a total storage pool of 256TB, this is a monster storage backup that with lightning speed transfer, backup and secure your data, photos, videos, etc. Connects up to six Thunderbolt devices or five devices and a monitor at the end of the chain. It will also support one 5K monitor display or two 4K monitors. Daisy-chaining can give you up to 588 TB of capacity with the bi-directional 40 Gbps performance of Thunderbolt 3. Mindblowing powerful expansive storage.

Drobo’s award-winning BeyondRAID technology, it protects data against single or dual disk drive failure. You can add drives, hot-swap, and real-time storage expansion with zero downtime. The lighting informational faceplate of the unit with the magnetic easily removable cover for hot-swapping drives gives you the basic one look data you need to know on issues and a quick way to change drives in and out.

The 8D comes equipped with a Drobo Accelerator Bay and is the only Drobo with the new Intelligent Volume Management technology. With the 8D you can combine both HHD’s and SSD’s to give you the fast transfers and efficiency you want for Data-Aware Tiering, allowing for transactional data to migrate to the SSDs making sure both writes and reads are accelerated. The Drobo 8D gives you the option to enable Hot Data Caching through the Drobo Accelerator Bay on the rear slot. Using an SSD allows access to most frequently read data to deliver blazing fast speeds.

With aMac, the Drobo 8D has Enhanced Time Machine Support, compatible with Apple’s Time Machine. Basically working as a complete giant external drive controllable with Drobo Dashboard with total ease of use. It works great with Apple’s Final Cut and Adobe Lightroom.

The Drobo 8D also protects your data from power failure with an internal battery that stays running long enough to store all the transferring data in memory, cache on the way to the drives. Saving you tons of money in backup power supplies etc.

Overall, we were super impressed with this quiet power storage monster. It is a must for business and anyone needing solid backup and data protection. Having the ability to expand to a massive scale with the epic speed of Thunderbolt 3 just makes this a great data backup machine. It performed effortlessly fast, easy to set up and honestly, we couldn’t find any faults about it. We give it 10 out of 10. Drobo has built a real winner.