Amazingly Mini
Drobo Mini has everything that’s in the high-capacity Drobo 5D in a package that’s the size of a deli sandwich. Made of a cutting-edge metallic carbon fiber with a soft-touch rubberized finish, Drobo Mini is small, rugged, and feels as cool as it looks. From the modern materials to the wraparound light indicators to the drive bay design, Mini is truly big storage in a small box.
Weighing in at about 3 pounds (fully loaded with drives installed), you can now carry up to 3TB1 of usable and protected capacity in your travel bag. To make Drobo Mini as portable as possible, there’s an optional carrying case that holds the Drobo, power supply, and a connectivity cable.
1. 1TB drives are available on the market today. When drives with more than 1TB capacity become available, you will have greater capacity.
First Drobo with 2.5” Drives
Drobo Mini takes 2.5” drives—that’s what makes it portable. Four hot-swappable drive bays support drives of any capacity. No carriers or screws are needed to insert drives into a Drobo and the Drobo Mini is no different. An innovative new design allows drives to click in and out like a ballpoint pen.
Since 2.5” drives are primarily used in laptop computers, they’re designed to be portable. Because of this, you can pick up and move Drobo Mini around with confidence.
Data Protection and Expandability Made Simple
Built on award-winning BeyondRAID technology with single- or dual-drive redundancy, Drobo Mini protects your data without any user interaction, even in the event of multiple drive failures.
Drives can be added or hot-swapped on-the-fly for storage expansion with zero downtime. If you’re running low on space, the wraparound lights on the front tell you what to do. Just add a drive in an empty bay or remove a smaller drive and replace it with a larger one.
Power of Thunderbolt & Flexibility of USB
Thunderbolt I/O technology provides performance that no personal storage has been able to achieve, especially one that’s portable. This allows you to move large amounts of data in a fraction of the time it used to take. Visit the Thunderbolt technology site to learn more about this exciting new way to connect devices.
Drobo Mini is equipped with dual Thunderbolt ports for daisy chaining. Connect up to six Thunderbolt devices and/or a non-Thunderbolt monitor at the end of the chain. This allows even the most portable laptop computers access to high-performance storage while retaining connectivity to other devices and an external monitor. The bidirectional 10 Gbps performance of Thunderbolt allows all devices in the chain to achieve maximum throughput.
Drobo is the only storage array that offers Thunderbolt AND USB 3.0. This latest generation of USB also offers high-performance connectivity and is backward compatibility with any computer running compatible versions of Mac OS X or Windows.
NOTE: Thunderbolt is currently supported only on Mac OS X
Capacity AND Performance
Data-Aware Tiering technology, usually reserved for business-class storage solutions, is also available in this portable Drobo. It intelligently uses the high-performance flash in SSDs to accelerate performance of the storage array, allowing applications such as Adobe Premiere and Apple Aperture fast access to data. To keep capacity of the Drobo at a maximum, the Drobo Accelerator Bay accepts an industry-standard mSATA SSD, leaving all four 2.5” drives bays available for high-capacity HDDs.
If getting the fastest performance possible is your thing, you can also load up every drive bay with SSDs. That would be a screaming fast portable Drobo!
Power Protecting Your Critical Data
Drobo doesn’t just protect you from a drive failure, but also from potential data loss after a power outage. Often found only in arrays that cost tens of thousands of dollars, Drobo Mini includes a battery that protects all data in memory, or cache, that is, data on its way to the drives. Yes, Drobo Mini actually has room for a big battery (barely)!
When power spontaneously goes away, the battery keeps the Drobo alive long enough for the data to be written to non-volatile storage, ensuring your important information is safe. This battery recharges itself and is designed to last for the life of the product.
Link to Giveaway | The Mini on NewEgg $450
Drobo Mini has everything that’s in the high-capacity Drobo 5D in a package that’s the size of a deli sandwich. Made of a cutting-edge metallic carbon fiber with a soft-touch rubberized finish, Drobo Mini is small, rugged, and feels as cool as it looks. From the modern materials to the wraparound light indicators to the drive bay design, Mini is truly big storage in a small box.
Weighing in at about 3 pounds (fully loaded with drives installed), you can now carry up to 3TB1 of usable and protected capacity in your travel bag. To make Drobo Mini as portable as possible, there’s an optional carrying case that holds the Drobo, power supply, and a connectivity cable.
1. 1TB drives are available on the market today. When drives with more than 1TB capacity become available, you will have greater capacity.
First Drobo with 2.5” Drives
Drobo Mini takes 2.5” drives—that’s what makes it portable. Four hot-swappable drive bays support drives of any capacity. No carriers or screws are needed to insert drives into a Drobo and the Drobo Mini is no different. An innovative new design allows drives to click in and out like a ballpoint pen.
Since 2.5” drives are primarily used in laptop computers, they’re designed to be portable. Because of this, you can pick up and move Drobo Mini around with confidence.
Data Protection and Expandability Made Simple
Built on award-winning BeyondRAID technology with single- or dual-drive redundancy, Drobo Mini protects your data without any user interaction, even in the event of multiple drive failures.
Drives can be added or hot-swapped on-the-fly for storage expansion with zero downtime. If you’re running low on space, the wraparound lights on the front tell you what to do. Just add a drive in an empty bay or remove a smaller drive and replace it with a larger one.
Power of Thunderbolt & Flexibility of USB
Thunderbolt I/O technology provides performance that no personal storage has been able to achieve, especially one that’s portable. This allows you to move large amounts of data in a fraction of the time it used to take. Visit the Thunderbolt technology site to learn more about this exciting new way to connect devices.
Drobo Mini is equipped with dual Thunderbolt ports for daisy chaining. Connect up to six Thunderbolt devices and/or a non-Thunderbolt monitor at the end of the chain. This allows even the most portable laptop computers access to high-performance storage while retaining connectivity to other devices and an external monitor. The bidirectional 10 Gbps performance of Thunderbolt allows all devices in the chain to achieve maximum throughput.
Drobo is the only storage array that offers Thunderbolt AND USB 3.0. This latest generation of USB also offers high-performance connectivity and is backward compatibility with any computer running compatible versions of Mac OS X or Windows.
NOTE: Thunderbolt is currently supported only on Mac OS X
Capacity AND Performance
Data-Aware Tiering technology, usually reserved for business-class storage solutions, is also available in this portable Drobo. It intelligently uses the high-performance flash in SSDs to accelerate performance of the storage array, allowing applications such as Adobe Premiere and Apple Aperture fast access to data. To keep capacity of the Drobo at a maximum, the Drobo Accelerator Bay accepts an industry-standard mSATA SSD, leaving all four 2.5” drives bays available for high-capacity HDDs.
If getting the fastest performance possible is your thing, you can also load up every drive bay with SSDs. That would be a screaming fast portable Drobo!
Power Protecting Your Critical Data
Drobo doesn’t just protect you from a drive failure, but also from potential data loss after a power outage. Often found only in arrays that cost tens of thousands of dollars, Drobo Mini includes a battery that protects all data in memory, or cache, that is, data on its way to the drives. Yes, Drobo Mini actually has room for a big battery (barely)!
When power spontaneously goes away, the battery keeps the Drobo alive long enough for the data to be written to non-volatile storage, ensuring your important information is safe. This battery recharges itself and is designed to last for the life of the product.
Link to Giveaway | The Mini on NewEgg $450
I had a Synology but sent it back for the 5N. 
I signed up for this one too because it's portable and all.
The nice thing about it is it has Thunderbolt jacks for Mac and a USB 3.0 for Windows.
