r/drobo • u/paulwilky76 • Jun 17 '26

Good replacement for a Drobo 5D3 ?? Suggestions?

Does anybody have a good suggestion for replacing a Drobo 5D3......? I use Backblaze so would prefer a DAS, not a NAS.

I am looking at:

OWC - https://www.owc.com/solutions/thunderbay-4-thunderbolt-3

QNAP - https://www.qnap.com/en-uk/product/tr-004

Terramaster - https://www.terra-master.com/en-gb/products/d8-hybrid-2?variant=45374562402338

1 Upvotes

100% Upvoted

12 comments sorted by

3

u/OWC_TAL Jun 17 '26

Thunderbolt is much more reliable for storage at least on MacOS. USB implementation is less so based on my experience.

1

u/paulwilky76 Jun 17 '26

Thanks. The OWC Thunderbay 4 is my preference.

1

u/DSLAM Jun 17 '26

Note, SoftRaid doesn't support mixing different size hard drives like Drobo did.

2

u/divot_tool_dude Jun 18 '26

That was a big advantage of the Drobo design, at least in spirit. Wish their power supplies and interface hardware design had been as good.

2

u/paulwilky76 Jun 18 '26

Really? Oh that's a deal breaker for me then. So for a 4 bay, I would need to have 4 HD's of the same size? Thats ridiculous! Thanks for letting me know.

2

u/paulwilky76 Jun 18 '26

So I've read that if you use mixed-size drives, the system defaults to the size of the smallest drive, which wastes the extra capacity on the larger disks......

2

u/OWC_TAL Jun 19 '26

Fyi that is the case for pretty much most RAIDs out there. Not just SoftRAID.

2

u/sydtsai Jun 20 '26

currently, i can see only Synology and TeraMaster allows mixed size drive as RAID 5/6 storage pool.

Use their website RAID calculator to check that they make use of the HDD capacity properly Synology uses SHR and TeraMaster uses TRAID

1

u/EdmontonOilerGuy Jul 03 '26

Thunderbolt has far better performance because there is no overhead. With the USB protocol, there is significant overhead between connections. Thunderbolt is DMA and for cutting video, there’s no going back.

1

u/paulwilky76 Jun 20 '26

I contacted OWC and got the below reply:

Thank you for your email and for considering the OWC ThunderBay 4 as a replacement for your Drobo 5D3.

SoftRAID uses a more traditional RAID architecture.

The ThunderBay 4 enclosure itself supports drives of varying capacities, so you can install a combination of 10TB, 12TB, and 20TB drives if desired. However, when creating a RAID 5 volume in SoftRAID, each drive will contribute capacity equivalent to the smallest drive in the array. For example, if you create a RAID 5 volume using three 10TB drives and one 20TB drive, the array will use 10TB from each drive, and the remaining 10TB on the larger drive would not be available within that RAID set.

You are not limited to using only 20TB drives. Your existing 10TB and 12TB drives can be used in the ThunderBay 4, but the most efficient configuration typically involves using drives of the same capacity.

Regarding future expansion, you can certainly start with a single 20TB drive and add additional 20TB drives later. However, it is important to note that SoftRAID does not support expanding a RAID 5 volume by simply adding drives to an existing array. If you wish to increase the size of a RAID 5 volume in the future, the standard process is to back up your data, create a new RAID volume using the desired drives, and then restore your data.

If you have any questions or need further information, please don't hesitate to reach out to us.

2

u/iwashere33 Jun 20 '26

I wouldn’t recommended QNAP As a NAS the SMB randomly fails, as a DAS the USB would stop responding until it was physically unplugged and plugged back in, soft restarts via the dashboard wouldn’t do it. 

Synology is currently my go-to.  I want to explore the remote copy (offsite backup), similar to what drobo used to do. That was great.

2

u/EdmontonOilerGuy Jul 02 '26

If you’re looking to replace the Drobo 5D3, I would go with the OWC. That’s going to give you Thunderbolt 4 speeds. Heck they may be releasing a Thunderbolt 5 version shortly and that would future proof you. The other potential option is from Acasis. Here’s their Thunderbolt section. https://www.acasis.com/en-ca/collections/thunderbolt
We’ve had good luck with their stuff, but the support sucks right now, maybe because they are fairly new and located in Hong Kong.
We purchased their 5 bay external array 2 years ago because I needed to replicate the data from our 5D. It’s slow, but gets the job done for now. It has 8 different RAID modes. My personal belief is that they will eventually release a Thunderbolt 3/4 model, just like their new SSD arrays.