Transition to Drobo 5n

I first purchased the 2nd gen Drobo S on 5/27/09 and DroboShare on 9/9/09. This combo has served me well over the years. It was great that I can slowly add in new drives when disk space was running low and being able to run this combo as a FTP server was useful at time.

Knowing that the transition from Drobo S to a FS or 5n was not easy. I'm not able to take the drives from one Drobo and relocate them to the new unit as I could do between say a Drobo S to another S unit or 5d. I knew that the only way I could transition them to just do a big copy and paste. This would have been the same issue if I had chosen to transition to anything else besides a Drobo DAS unit.

As free space on Drobo was getting less I started to get nervous. I had the following questions:

1. How many drives do I need in the new unit to make the transition?
2. How long do Drobos run for? (currently my old unit is still running perfectly)
3. How do I recover if something dies during the transition?

At the time of purchase the 5n wasn't supporting DroboApps which had allowed me to run the S as a FTP server. I wasn't using that feature very much but I really liked how in theory the ability to transition from one NAS or DAS another respective NAS or DAS easily. In the spirit of keeping a positive balance on my bank account, I only wanted to buy an additional drive.

The transition was rather painless. The new drive I purchased was able to completely hold all my data. After the transfer I slowly swapped drives one at a time letting Drobo do its job per swap before plugging in the next one. Off the bat I've noticed:

• Faster transfer speeds even without installing the MSata drive
• DroboApps is now supported by the 5n, just waiting for apps to become available
• Might be a buffer issue but I can't view many thumbnails of my raw files in Adobe Bridge from the 5n. I don't have this issue when viewing them from my desktop drives
• The 5n has better access control than the S. I was only able to password lock the entire unit with the S
• In the future if the 5n dies, I would just have to buy the latest Drobo NAS and directly swap the drives and it would preserve all my files (fingers crossed)