Drobo hits the turbo-boost with newly launched 5N home NAS

I had a FireWire Drobo back in the day and it was interesting but a total dog for performance. This model, with the revamped CPU, SSD for rapid caching and network based would fit really nice into my home network. Very interesting.

With the 5N, Drobo hopes to change this. The new NAS contains two notable changes to the underlying hardware. Ars spoke with Drobo VP Mario Blandini, who informed us that the processor in the 5N has been beefed up from a dual-core ARM CPU to a "multicore" ARM CPU. More than anything else, this will boost throughput over the older models, as one core of the dual-core ARM CPU had been dedicated to running the Drobo's back-end operating system and BeyondRAID storage system, and the other core ran a virtualized Linux instance which handled all the file shares and front-end IO. Large network file transfers were handled by the front-facing virtualized Linux environment and would quickly peg the single available core of the split-brained CPU, even if the disks weren't being taxed. Older models rarely climbed past 30-40MB per second even in large streaming file transfers.