Hard drives are cheaper than ever, so there's no excuse for not keeping your precious data backed up. Drobo's affordable storage solutions use data-aware tiering to protect against a single drive failure, traditionally at the expense of speed — until now. The company’s latest Drobo 5D and Drobo mini products offer the protection of a RAID storage array coupled with modern, lightning-fast Thunderbolt and USB 3.0 connectivity. 

While the new Drobos essentially do the same thing, they're aimed at different users. In either case, you’ll need to supply your own bare internal hard drives or SSDs, starting with a minimum of two. As your storage needs grow, you can add additional drives or even swap out existing drives for larger ones, without losing any data.

The Drobo 5D can hold up to 20TB of storage.

Drobo 5D includes five 3.5-inch SATA drive bays capable of utilizing the latest 4TB models now available, for a total capacity of 20TB in a single box. Drobo mini, on the other hand, is targeted at laptop users who need safe, reliable storage on the go, shrinking down to a svelte frame: 7.3 inches wide, 7.1 inches deep, and just 1.8 inches tall, and weighing only 2.2 pounds empty. Drobo mini can hold up to four 2.5-inch hard drives for a maximum capacity of 4TB at this writing.

Of course, that’s all theoretical — Drobo uses space roughly equal to that of your largest drive for protection against data loss, so the maximum capacity will automatically be reduced after the drives are formatted. Loading our Drobo 5D with five 2TB Hitachi hard drives gave us 7.21TB of usable storage instead of 10TB, for example. Likewise, sticking four 1TB Seagate hard drives inside the Drobo mini gave us 2.70TB.

That may sound like a bummer at first, but you’ll breathe a sigh of relief when the fateful day comes and a drive actually fails (and it’s not a matter of if, but when). The Drobo will notify you of such a failure with a blinking red status light next to the drive in question. (On the Drobo mini, these lights appear as a glowing ring around the front.) Slip out the bum drive, swap in another – even a larger-capacity model — and the Drobo will automatically rearrange the data across all available drives without missing a beat.

Since Drobo already has its “beyond RAID” philosophy down pat, the 2012 models instead focus on speed. In addition to the fast throughput offered by Thunderbolt and USB 3.0, Drobo 5D and Drobo mini offer the option to insert a small mSATA solid state drive into their underbelly for increased performance. This is known as the Drobo Accelerator Bay, which uses the SSD to buffer data between hard drives and computer for even faster transfer rates, particularly noticeable with smaller files such as large Aperture photo libraries.

Drobo recommends a 64GB mSATA SSD, which currently sell for around $75 on Amazon. The plastic casing on the Drobos may be nice to look at, but the Drobo mini’s Accelerator Bay cover proved to be a bit on the flimsy side, with the plastic screw getting chewed up just by opening and closing it once. Otherwise, no tools are required to insert hard drives, SSDs, or mSATA.

At the bottom front of each Drobo is a storage capacity light, which gradually expands from left to right as the drive fills up. There’s one caveat with this: When you initially format drives using the Drobo Dashboard software for Mac, you’ll want to select the largest capacity you intend to use in the future, rather than what you are starting out with. In the case of the Drobo 5D, that limit is 16TB — anything beyond that must be formatted as a second volume.

So the real question is: Just how fast are we talking here? Using the Blackmagic Disk Speed Test app for Mac over Thunderbolt with a 5GB stress setting, we saw 184MBps writes and 256MBps reads from the Drobo mini using four 1TB 7,200-rpm hard drives. With five 2TB 7,200-rpm hard drives in the Drobo 5D, those transfer rates increased to 206MBps write and 324MBps read.

By comparison, a LaCie 2Big Thunderbolt with twin 2TB 7,200-rpm hard drives fared a bit better at writes (295MBps) but lagged the Drobo on reads (302MBps). Curiously, the Drobos performed a little better using Blackmagic’s speed test without an mSATA installed in the Accelerator Bay, presumably because the 64GB SSD actually slows down consistently large data transfers, such as those used with high-definition video. (Cheaper, slower 5,400-rpm hard drives will also see a reduction in read/write speed.)

The Drobo mini looks small, but can still fit up to four 2.5-inch drives inside.

Make no mistake: These are the fastest Drobos ever, and the security and convenience afforded by them are easily worth a small penalty to raw disk speed, especially when Thunderbolt provides such a wide data pipe in the first place. We had no problem editing ProRes 422 (HQ)-quality 1080p HD stored on either Drobo using Final Cut Pro X, and the Drobo mini in particular makes up for moderately slower performance by its diminutive size and portability.

Convenience and security aside, the new Drobos are a tad louder than we’d like — the Drobo mini fan averages 56db when idle, while the Drobo 5D actually shaves a couple decibels off that reading. Thankfully, neither gets any louder than this, and both models come with dual Thunderbolt ports, allowing them to be daisy-chained and kept a reasonable distance from your workspace.

While the new Drobos can’t boot from an OS X-equipped hard drive via Thunderbolt, they have no such problem with USB 3.0 on Macs equipped with such ports. Drobo even includes cables for both — a nice touch considering that Thunderbolt cables cost up to $50 each.

The bottom line. The release of Drobo 5D and Drobo mini usher in a new era for the company’s small business and creative professional storage products, finally delivering the speed we’ve always craved, while retaining the classic security and ease of use Drobos are legendary for. They may seem a little on the pricey side, but the 2012 Drobos are a perfect match for any creative Mac user looking for speed and the reliability of being able to sleep at night knowing your content is safe from drive failure.