What you should know:
Measuring 7.3x1.8x7.1 inches, and weighing just about 3 pounds (with the four drive bays fully loaded), the Drobo Mini is the most compact four-bay storage device. This is mostly because it's designed to house 2.5-inch laptop hard drives and not the regular 3.5-inch desktop hard drives. The Drobo Mini is not exactly "the size of a deli sandwich" as described on Drobo's Web site, however; rather, it's about the size of a Mac Mini, slightly thicker and heavier, in fact.
Generally, there's basically nothing to the setup process of a Thunderbolt drive. For most of them, you just have to plug the drive into a power outlet and the computer, using a Thunderbolt cable, and that's it. Within a few seconds you can use the drive. With others, you might have to format the drive using the Disk Utility (Mac) or Disk Management (Windows), a process that takes less than a minute to do.
It's got a slew of unique little features including an mSATA drive bay, a built-in emergency battery, a cool magnetic drive bay door, and many colorful LED status lights. There's also a little bit of money-saving: like most recent Thunderbolt drives, the Drobo Mini comes with the necessary Thunderbolt cable included.
On the down side, the Drobo Mini bears a crazy price tag of $650 with no storage included; it takes a long time to start up; and it's noisier than most Thunderbolt drives. In terms of performance, when hosting four high-speed 2.5-inch hard drives, the drive fell short in my testing when compared with its peers, using both Thunderbolt and USB 3.0 connection types.
What it offers:
The esoteric Drobo Mini seems unique mostly for being unique's sake, and offers very little in terms of usability considering its crazily high cost.
The advantage:
The Drobo Mini is compact, can host four drives with dynamic storage scalability and protection, supports both Thunderbolt and USB 3.0, and offers an excellent drive bay design.
The unfavorable:
The Drobo Mini is very expensive, comparatively slow, hot, noisy, takes a long time to start up and overall proves to be a cumbersome storage device to use.
The price:
$569.00
Measuring 7.3x1.8x7.1 inches, and weighing just about 3 pounds (with the four drive bays fully loaded), the Drobo Mini is the most compact four-bay storage device. This is mostly because it's designed to house 2.5-inch laptop hard drives and not the regular 3.5-inch desktop hard drives. The Drobo Mini is not exactly "the size of a deli sandwich" as described on Drobo's Web site, however; rather, it's about the size of a Mac Mini, slightly thicker and heavier, in fact.
Generally, there's basically nothing to the setup process of a Thunderbolt drive. For most of them, you just have to plug the drive into a power outlet and the computer, using a Thunderbolt cable, and that's it. Within a few seconds you can use the drive. With others, you might have to format the drive using the Disk Utility (Mac) or Disk Management (Windows), a process that takes less than a minute to do.
It's got a slew of unique little features including an mSATA drive bay, a built-in emergency battery, a cool magnetic drive bay door, and many colorful LED status lights. There's also a little bit of money-saving: like most recent Thunderbolt drives, the Drobo Mini comes with the necessary Thunderbolt cable included.
On the down side, the Drobo Mini bears a crazy price tag of $650 with no storage included; it takes a long time to start up; and it's noisier than most Thunderbolt drives. In terms of performance, when hosting four high-speed 2.5-inch hard drives, the drive fell short in my testing when compared with its peers, using both Thunderbolt and USB 3.0 connection types.
What it offers:
The esoteric Drobo Mini seems unique mostly for being unique's sake, and offers very little in terms of usability considering its crazily high cost.
The advantage:
The Drobo Mini is compact, can host four drives with dynamic storage scalability and protection, supports both Thunderbolt and USB 3.0, and offers an excellent drive bay design.
The unfavorable:
The Drobo Mini is very expensive, comparatively slow, hot, noisy, takes a long time to start up and overall proves to be a cumbersome storage device to use.
The price:
$569.00
