For today (April 8, 2013), Amazon’s Gold Box Deal of the Day is the Drobo 5N storage device, discounted over $100.

While this ain’t the new 5D model, the 5N is a solid choice. It’s network ready and offers the data protection you expect from Drobo.

Wow. Enter now.

I am a pleased Drobo customer since 2009. I have a basic, straightforward setup that has worked flawlessly for years. But… I do admit that despite its endurance, I wish my Drobo would be faster.

So what’s Drobo to do? Redesign their products emphasizing speed and performance and release the new Drobo 5D and unexpected Drobo Mini. Both of these new devices are equipped with Thunderbolt ports (two of them) and USB 3.0. Gone is Firewire. To further increase caching performance, you can add a mini-format SSD drive to ease the overhead of redundancy. While you should have your data drives on a UPS in case of power outages, both devices feature power protection with an internal battery that ensures your Drobo completes all of its saves and writes before shutdown. Yes, your data deserves that.

The Drobo 5D has space for five 3.5-in drives. From what I understand, DroboShare is not supported on this new platform (5D and Mini). But what about that Mini product? The Mini shares the same blazing architecture as the 5D but instead of using 3.5-in drives, the Mini supports up to four 2.5-in drives typically found in laptops. Can you imagine the speeds if you were to exclusively use SSDs in the Mini? But please, even though the USB 3.0 port is backwards compatible with USB 2.0, don’t connect the new speedy Drobos to this slower interface. Your sanity does not deserve that.

So if you’re in the market for a data storage refresh come this summer, consider the Drobo 5D or Mini, estimated at $850 and $650 respectively. You and your data deserve this.

• iTunes for Mac: Moving your iTunes Media folder. When you want to move your iTunes files to another hard drive.
• Time Machine backup error: Too big for backup volume. When Time Machine acts up and refuses to backup your files.
• Drobo and Lion Mac OS X 10.7 compatibility.
• How to safely shutdown your Drobo.
• Configure Drobo to work with Lion’s Time Machine.

If you’ve been waiting for a data storage solution that’s expandable and redundant, look no further than Drobo. And yes, I am now a Drobo affiliate aka a Drobo Champ.

Must be my weak mind or penchant for deals, but I couldn’t resist getting a Western Digital drive that was a featured Amazon deal. What I didn’t know at the time was this drive is a new “4K” EARS drive.

But no matter! With the newest Drobo firmware and software, 4K drives are supported and sure enough, my Drobo recognized the extra storage capacity after a few seconds. So now, my Drobo has EARS.

Doing some quick price checks, I placed my order through Newegg.com.  At the time, Newegg’s Drobo cost was cheaper than most other online stores, Drobo was offering $50 back, and Newegg’s shipping to Hawaii was the lowest at ~$30.

My needs for a Drobo are pretty straightforward.  My internal drive was filling up and I already have an external drive for Mac OS X Time Machine backups.  The biggest problem is drive space for audio and video files.  I also have an AppleTV which syncs with the iTunes library.  If you want movies and television shows sync-ed with your AppleTV, then you need to leave them in the iTunes library.  This is where the problem comes.

With too many videos, especial HD ones, and high resolution pictures the internal drive fills up quick.  And I don’t want to manually add and delete movies to iTunes.  I didn’t want to get yet another basic external drive for my movies since there would be no backup of that.  So that’s where the Drobo fits in.

I have 3 drives in my Drobo which automatically configures a data redundant scheme.  Setup of a Drobo is easy, too easy in fact.  Nothing exciting.  The hardest part was clearing a space on my crowded desk for the hardware (which is bigger than I expected).  I’m using the FireWire 800 interface, and USB 2.0 is available.

For now, I migrated my iTunes music to the Drobo.  I haven’t moved my entire multimedia library including videos and pictures since I’m not exactly sure how that’s done.  Migrating iTunes music is documented and moving my entire Mac OS X Home directory is documented, but I haven’t found how to move the pictures and movies folders to another drive.  But moving my music alone freed up over 100 GB of space on my internal drive so that’s good enough.

I also use the Drobo for working on iMovie projects.  The speed of the Drobo was a concern of mine, but it’s been fast enough.  One minor thing is that the Drobo does go to sleep once in awhile so the drives take a few seconds to spin up when that happens.  It’s noticeable but not overly so.

I guess I could also use the Drobo for Time Machine backups since it is compatible.  But because I already have an external drive dedicated to Time Machine, I’ll keep this arrangement.

To round out my backup and archive scheme, at the suggestion of @mirthlab, I might have to reconsider something like SuperDuper.  Maybe I should move my Time Machine backups to the Drobo then repurpose my external drive as a SuperDuper clone??

So there you go about my Drobo.  If got any questions, leave me a comment.

Their quick start guide is simple and straightforward. Installation was easy, and I haven’t yet cracked open the instruction manual.

Seems like Drobo took a few packaging design cues from Apple.

Looks like a Drobo!