A mighty mouse, an editing console, a portable SSD, and more…
Flexible storage expansion
£681.98 (enclosure only) FROM Drobo, drobo.com FEATURES 2x Thunderbolt 3, 1x USB-C (5Gbps) ports, mSATA bay
Drobo makes flexible storage arrays that enable you to add more disks to
boost capacity. Swap out a failed or low-capacity disk and it adjusts to the change.
The 5D3 is equipped with two Thunderbolt 3 ports. Our unit came with five 3.5-inch Toshiba DT Desktop Series disks, from 500GB to 2TB. We got mean average transfer rates of 547.1 and 325.8MB/sec when reading and writing sequentially, and 180.4 and 124.8MB/sec when reading and writing random locations. Good, though unspectacular. The peak sequential read speed was 1027.9MB/sec – far below Thunderbolt 3’s potential; using faster hard disks or SSDs is one way to speed up transfers. Another is to add an mSATA SSD to the Drobo Accelerator Bay. Using a 64GB Plextor M6M, it took 7.4 seconds on the first run to transfer a 4GB test file to our MacBook Pro, and just 2.4 once cached. The benefit was slimmer with a 20GB test file, yet still appreciable: 49.9 seconds down to 30.8.
Drobo Dashboard and its complementary menu bar utility show array and disk status info with clarity. Despite a Kensington lock slot to secure the 5D3, sadly you can’t lock the bay cover.