In fact, the Drobo Mini is the noisiest compact storage device I've used, rivaling even the Pegasus R6, which is a huge device, about six times the physical size of the Drobo Mini. These fans run all the time starting from the moment you turn the drive on, and they're noisy. On the back, the Drobo Mini has two ventilation fans on both of its sides.
This in itself could make the drive a terrible choice as an external storage device when you are in a hurry. Other Thunderbolt storage devices take just a few seconds to be ready.
#PROMISE PEGASUS R4 DRIVES BLUE LIGHTS SOLID SOFTWARE#
The good news is you can use the Drobo Dashboard software to dim these lights.Īnd the Drobo Mini takes a long time to start up, ranging from 1.5 minutes to a whole 4 minutes in my trials. As you can imagine, all these lights make the front of the Drobo quite busy to look at, especially while the drive is starting up, when these lights are constantly flashing or changing colors or both. It's true: also on the front, at the bottom edge, the storage device has three more LED lights, two little ones that show the power status (always green) and activity (flashing green), and a long blue light that works as a storage gauge: from left, it partially glows brighter to indicate how much of the total capacity has been used up. Especially considering that the Drobo Mini has even more lights. Most of the time, however, I find these lights too bright and they can be an annoyance when you want to keep the room dark. This is a helpful feature when something is not right. During a RAID rebuild, all of the lights of the four drive bays will be flashing green and amber. When something happens, such as a drive has crashed (or was pulled out during an operation), the color of the light will change to red. Wrapping around each of the drive bays is a bright LED light that stay green when everything is in order. This is very similar to how you use an SD card with most digital cameras, which is as well-designed as can be. To remove it, you just push again and it will come out. It's very easy to insert a drive or remove it from its bay no tool is necessary, since each drive can be pushed in its place. For example, for just $500 the WD My Book Thunderbolt Duo offers slightly faster overall speeds, 6TB (or 3TB protected) of storage space, and a much more straightforward experience. For productivity, remember to also check out the alternatives on this list. That said, if you don't mind spending money on uniqueness, the Drobo is available now, though you won't find it at Apple's store, where you'll find most other Thunderbolt storage products. 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. On the down side, at the time of the review, 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 devices I've worked with. There's also a little bit of money-saving: like most recent Thunderbolt storage devices, the Drobo Mini comes with the necessary Thunderbolt cable included.
And finally, 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.
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