Drobo 5C review

With space for five separate drives and Drobo's BeyondRAID storage technology, the 5C may well be the secure storage solution every photographer needs

Digital Camera World Verdict

IT experts and power users might prefer a conventional RAID solution for reasons of performance and connectivity but for non-experts, the Drobo 5C is a supremely simple way to get the security advantages of a RAID system and enjoy incredibly easy data storage upgrades. It’s not cheap, but you’re paying for security, simplicity and flexibility – and that's worth a lot.

Pros

  • +

    Ability to hot-swap drives

  • +

    Use of mixed capacity drives

  • +

    Lamps for visual availability check

Cons

  • -

    Noisier than a desktop drive

  • -

    Weighty

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Storage can be a real headache for photographers. You may already be at the stage when your image archive won’t fit on your computer’s internal disk drive. An external desktop drive is the obvious solution, but these have two drawbacks. 

First, they will eventually run out of storage capacity too. Second, there’s the nagging fear of hard disk failure and the loss of all your data. You should always make regular backups, of course, but you still stand to lose all the work you’ve done since your last back-up.

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