Top 6 Best Drobo Alternatives in 2022

Drobo, one of the most famous brands for capacity among photographers, has filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy security. While this doesn’t mean the brand will vanish, it very well may be an ideal opportunity to search for an alternative option for good measure.

Drobo has had significant challenges keeping its supply chain intact through the COVID-19 pandemic, and the organization says that it has had to postpone production across its whole line. This issue may be unquestionably somewhat answerable for the organization’s ongoing financial woes.

The people who are anxious about Drobo’s future and its capacity to keep up with software backing should begin taking a gander at choices, and fortunately, there are other incredible choices available. Drobo offers two direct attached storage (DAS) choices and two network attached storage (NAS) arrangements and below you’ll track down strong replacement choices for each.

At a Glance

• Best Drobo Alternative for Direct Attached Storage
• Best Drobo 5D3 Alternative: OWC ThunderBay 4
• Best Drobo B810i Alternative: OWC ThunderBay 8
• Best Drobo Alternative for Network Attached Storage
• Best Drobo 5N2 Alternative: Synology DiskStation DS1522+
• Best Drobo B810n Alternative: Synology DiskStation DS1821+

Best Drobo Alternative for Direct Attached Storage

While laptops and desktop computers tend to come with sizeable built-in storage choices, they frequently can be really costly and don’t be guaranteed to give as much storage as photographers will require over the long run.

That is the reason numerous professionals will get a neighborhood joined storage solution for information backup.

Hard Drive Disks (HDD) choices will generally give the best cost per gigabyte of storage since they’re significantly less expensive to produce than solid state drives (SSD).

The downside is that individual HDD disks can fail all the more effectively over the long haul and they are slower, so photographers will frequently deploy them in a RAID exhibit which makes them cooperate to offer better speeds and RAID arrays consider at least one drive to fizzle and not lose any information (contingent upon the RAID arrangement and the number of attached drives).

Drobo gives two choices to RAID arrays: the 5D3 and the B810i. The 5D3 backings up to five HDD disks while the B810i can take up to eight. The more drives an array can hold, the higher the backup capacity and the more RAID choices are accessible.

Best Drobo 5D3 Alternative: OWC ThunderBay 4

OWC, which represents Other World Computing, makes a large group of reasonable PC and Mac peripherals including hard drive arrays and Thunderbolt Docks. The ThunderBay 4 is our pick to supplant your Drobo as a result of the sheer number of choices that OWC accommodates the cost.

The ThunderBay has four HDD bays, which is not exactly Drobo’s five-bay 5D3, however it actually considers RAID 0, 1, 4, 5, 10, and JBOD configurations and communicates information by means of a Thunderbolt 3 association.

OWC upholds the array with its SoftRAID drive the management software that permits you to figure out what kind of RAID to utilize, and monitor disk health, and is cross-platform among macOS and Windows.

Compared with the Drobo 5D3, which retails for $700, the ThunderBay costs $629. Remember, both these costs are before the expansion of genuine drives and in the two cases you’ll need to buy four (or for Drobo’s case, five) HDDs to begin utilizing them as a matter of fact.

OWC gives options somewhere in the range of 4TB and 72TB, however, the enclosure will work with any standard 3.5-inch or 2.5-inch HDD or SSD. OWC additionally has an exceptional five-year guarantee on the enclosure.

OWC furnishes its drives with Toshiba HDDs, and Backblaze has shown the organization’s drives are performing great such a long way in 2022. On the off chance that you’d prefer to go with an alternate HDD manufacturer, you can.

Other extraordinary choices in this category incorporate the SanDisk Professional G-RAID Shuttle and the LaCid 6Big. The G-RAID is significantly more costly at $2,100 for the base model since it ships with drives included with no choice to simply buy an empty enclosure.

All things considered, SanDisk incorporates four 6TB Western Digital Ultrastar HDDs in that package, which retail for about $172 each (about $688 all out). The G-RAID Shuttle can be outfitted with up to 72TB of storage at the hour of purchase as well.

LaCie is a Seagate organization and the 6Big has a bigger capacity than Drobo’s 5D3, OWC’s ThunderBay 4, and the G-RAID Shuttle.

As you would have speculated from the name, it has six complete bays and can be bought for $2,300 for a comparable all-out storage measure of 24TB (very much like with the G-RAID, the enclosure and the drives are incorporated together).

The advantage of the 6Big is that it can take more drives and in this manner theoretically hold a more total capacity, although the organization just offers up to 108TB for $6,500.

Best Drobo B810i Alternative: OWC ThunderBay 8

For the majority of similar reasons we picked the OWC Thunderbay as the best option for the Drobo 5D3, the 8-sound OWC ThunderBay 8 is the most ideal decision to supplant your B810i.

While it is hard to track down an array that can immediately plug-and-play swap-out for the 5D3 since it utilizes the somewhat unusual 5-bay configuration, the ThunderBay 8 can assume control over right where the B810i left off.

The ThunderBay 8 backings Thunderbolt 3, similar to macOS and Windows, the organization’s SoftRAID XT disk monitoring and management software, and an excellent five-year guarantee.

The ThunderBay 8 can be bought as only an enclosure for $879 which is a critical markdown over Drobo’s B810i and it very well may be furnished with somewhere in the range of 16TB and 144TB of storage by means of Toshiba HDDs.

SanDisk offers the G-RAID Shuttle 8-bay too, however, it doesn’t come cheap. The giant array begins at $7,300 for 96TB of storage, yet the organization will go as high as 144TB of storage for $9,000.

The restricted customization choices and the exorbitant cost presumably make it a poor fit for the people who are attempting to supplant their Drobo B810i, however, a possibility for those who truly need to stick with the WD or SanDisk brands.

Best Drobo Alternative for Network Attached Storage

Drobo offers two NAS options, the 5N2 and the B810n, which are like the organization’s DAS choices besides systems networking features.

Best Drobo 5N2 Alternative: Synology DiskStation DS1522+

Synology is essentially the undisputed champion of NAS storage choices, and the as of late announced DS1522+ added a five-bay array to the organization’s lineup that is an incredible fit to supplant a Drobo 5N2. the DS1522+ has a moderately little footprint, can be extended to up to 15 drives (by interfacing different enclosures together), and upholds NVM3 SSD storing and 10GbE networking via an adapter.

The DS1522+ is overseen through Synology’s DiskStation Manager software and can be utilized as a devoted neighborhood backup solution.

There is even a photography-specific app inside Synology’s software called Synology Photos, which empowers hobby photographers hoping to deal with their developing assortment to rapidly pull and back up media from their phones, sort, and organize pictures, and make them effectively shareable with consents control.

The Synology DS1522+ is somewhat more costly at $700, which is more than Drobo’s $499 offering, yet given Synology’s sterling standing, the cost implies dependability. In the event that you’re OK scaling down to a four-cove NAS exhibit, Synology’s $550 DS920+ is a strong other option. Synology doesn’t offer HDDs included with its enclosures, so you’ll need to independently gain those.

Best Drobo B810n Alternative: Synology DiskStation DS1821+

Assuming you’re supplanting your Drobo B810n eight-bay array, we actually suggest you go with Synology. The organization’s DiskStation DS1821+ is its 8-bay solution that can deal with requesting application workloads and an extraordinary number of simultaneous clients. It is controlled by an AMB Ryzen Quad-core 2.2GHz processor, can be extended to up to 18 drives with optional expansion units, and features 10GbE networking support.

All that on the software side that makes Synology the best pick in the five-bay department carries over to the eight-bay choice too, and it’s difficult to beat Synology here since the organization’s whole business is based on excellent NAS execution. The Synology DiskStation DS1821+ is accessible for $1,000, which is not exactly Drobo’s $1,200 B810n, regardless, you should supply your own HDD or SSD drives.