Drobo 5N 5-Bay NAS Review

Setup – A few more things and App Examples

There is one more thing to show here and that is how it looks when we pull a drive out of the system – which is one of the things that we easily can do with the Drobo. This might because we want to replace it with a different drive, a larger drive, or just want to remove it. The system will reflect this right away and start to rebuild the drive setup, repair it as you might say.

This is a bit different to the previously shown warning when we change the drive redundancy setup as the leftover drives still are green and thereby protect here instead of all them being under rebuild.

That was all when it comes the built-in basic features and functions. But as mentioned earlier, we can add a lot more functionality to the Drobo 5N NAS with extra apps, both from Drobo and third-party creators. There is quite a long list, but no grid view to look at them – so you have to scroll through the list to find what you’re looking for. There is something for almost any need, from Webserver functionality with MySQL over WordPress and CMS systems.

Firefly media server for iTunes and headphones automatic music downloader are among popular apps, but apps such as tpop are also present.

Transmission is probably one of the most popular download clients around and with good reason. It’s awesome and you’ll also find that on your Drobo along with such useful features as the Unrar file archiver function.

A main feature in a NAS, at least at home, is for media playback and Drobo features support for Plex Media Server.

Some apps such as the ProFTP Daemon feature pre-launch settings as seen here or web-based interfaces such as the one shown above.

Or they feature both.

Here’s also a view of the well-known Transmission interface that a lot of you probably know very well.

I could show a lot more apps here, but they’re kind of optional and it all comes down to what you need. You can however find a list of them on the official Drobo page too, should you want to know everything before you purchase such a system.