--- product_id: 1968329 title: "Drobo mini: Direct Attached Storage - 4 bay array - USB3 and Thunderbolt ports - Designed for portability. (DR-MINI-1A21)" brand: "drobo" price: "€ 18.97" currency: EUR in_stock: false reviews_count: 6 url: https://www.desertcart.at/products/1968329-drobo-mini-direct-attached-storage-4-bay-array-usb3-thunderbolt store_origin: AT region: Austria --- # Hot Swappable Drives 3000 GB Storage USB 3.0 & Thunderbolt Drobo mini: Direct Attached Storage - 4 bay array - USB3 and Thunderbolt ports - Designed for portability. (DR-MINI-1A21) **Brand:** drobo **Price:** € 18.97 **Availability:** ❌ Out of Stock ## Summary > 📦 Your Data, Anywhere: The Ultimate Portable Storage Solution! ## Quick Answers - **What is this?** Drobo mini: Direct Attached Storage - 4 bay array - USB3 and Thunderbolt ports - Designed for portability. (DR-MINI-1A21) by drobo - **How much does it cost?** € 18.97 with free shipping - **Is it available?** Currently out of stock - **Where can I buy it?** [www.desertcart.at](https://www.desertcart.at/products/1968329-drobo-mini-direct-attached-storage-4-bay-array-usb3-thunderbolt) ## Best For - drobo enthusiasts ## Why This Product - Trusted drobo brand quality - Free international shipping included - Worldwide delivery with tracking - 15-day hassle-free returns ## Key Features - • **🔋 Reliable Backup:** Built-in battery backup ensures your data is safe, even during unexpected power outages. - • **🚀 Portable Powerhouse:** Designed for on-the-go professionals, this compact RAID solution fits seamlessly into your mobile lifestyle. - • **🌟 User-Friendly Design:** Hot swappable drives make upgrading and maintaining your storage a breeze, keeping you productive. - • **🔒 Ultimate Flexibility:** Supports any 2.5" SATA drive, allowing you to mix and match brands and speeds for tailored performance. - • **⚙️ Effortless Connectivity:** Equipped with dual Thunderbolt and USB 3.0 ports for lightning-fast data transfer and easy integration. ## Overview The Drobo Mini is a cutting-edge portable RAID storage solution that accommodates up to four 2.5" SATA drives and one mSATA SSD. With dual Thunderbolt and USB 3.0 connectivity, it offers rapid data transfer speeds and flexibility for any user. Weighing just 2.2 pounds, this sleek metallic device is designed for professionals who need reliable, on-the-go storage without compromising performance. ## Description Product Description Mini in size only. It's a Drobo, so by definition it's easy-to-use. Now it's also the fastest portable storage array. Along with the power of BeyondRAID, delivering all the power and flexibility of the Drobo 5D, in a miniaturized package. Made of a cutting-edge metallic carbon fiber with a soft-touch rubberized finish, Drobo Mini is small and rugged. Weighing in at 3 pounds (fully loaded with drives installed), you can now carry up to 3TB of usable and protected data in your travel bag. To make Drobo Mini as portable as possible, there's an optional carrying case that holds the Drobo, power supply, and a connectivity cable. Drobo Mini takes 2.5" drives, four hot-swappable drive bays support drives of any capacity. Built on award-winning BeyondRAID technology with single- or dual-drive redundancy, Drobo Mini protects your data without any user interaction, even in the event of multiple drive failures. Drives can be added or hot-swapped on-the-fly for storage expansion with zero downtime. Connect up to six Thunderbolt devices and/or a non-Thunderbolt monitor at the end of the chain. The bidirectional 10 Gbps performance of Thunderbolt allows all devices in the chain to achieve maximum throughput. Drobo is the only storage array that offers Thunderbolt AND USB 3.0; latest generation of USB also offers high-performance connectivity and is backward compatibility with any computer running compatible versions of Mac OS X or Windows. Data-Aware Tiering technology, is also available in this portable Drobo. This drive uses the high-performance flash in SSDs to accelerate performance of the storage array, allowing applications such as Adobe Premiere and Apple Aperture fast access to data. To keep capacity of the Drobo at a maximum, the Drobo Accelerator Bay accepts an industry-standard mSATA SSD, leaving all four 2.5" drives bays available for high-capacity HDDs. Drobo Mini includes a battery that protects all data in memory, or cache. .com Drobo Mini is small, ruggedized and feels as cool as it looks No carriers or screws are needed to insert drives into a Drobo Mini Protects your data without any user interaction, even in the event of multiple drive failures Drobo Mini is equipped with dual Thunderbolt ports for daisy chaining Mini in Size OnlyIt's a Drobo, so by definition it's easy-to-use. Now it's also the fastest portable storage array--with cutting-edge Thunderbolt and USB 3.0 connectivity and innovative use of solid state drives (SSDs). Along with the power of BeyondRAID, it delivers all the power and flexibility of its larger sibling, Drobo 5D, in a miniaturized package.Whether you're working at your desktop, shooting and editing photos or videos on-site, or traveling to the next location, it's the world's first high-performance and protected portable storage array. So now you can take and access your valuable digital assets wherever you go. Easiest, fastest, safest, smallest--Drobo Mini is very unique and unexpected--but frankly that's what you should expect from Drobo.Amazingly MiniDrobo Mini has everything that's in the high-capacity Drobo 5D in a package that's the size of a deli sandwich. Made of a cutting-edge metallic carbon fiber with a soft-touch rubberized finish, Drobo Mini is small, ruggedized, and feels as cool as it looks. From the modern materials to the wraparound light indicators to the drive bay design, Mini is truly big storage in a small box.Weighing in at about 3 pounds (fully loaded with drives installed), you can now carry up to 3TB of usable and protected capacity in your travel bag. (When drives with more than 1TB capacity become available, you will have greater capacity.) To make Drobo Mini as portable as possible, there's an optional carrying case that holds the Drobo, power supply, and a connectivity cable.First Drobo with 2.5" DrivesDrobo Mini takes 2.5" drives--that's what makes it portable. Four hot-swappable drive bays support drives of any capacity. No carriers or screws are needed to insert drives into a Drobo and the Drobo Mini is no different. An innovative new design allows drives to click in and out like a ballpoint pen.Since 2.5" drives are primarily used in laptop computers, they're designed to be portable. Because of this, you can pick up and move Drobo Mini around with confidence.Data Protection and Expandability Made SimpleBuilt on award-winning BeyondRAID technology with single-or dual-drive redundancy, Drobo Mini protects your data without any user interaction, even in the event of multiple drive failures.Drives can be added or hot-swapped on-the-fly for storage expansion with zero downtime. If you're running low on space, the wraparound lights on the front tell you what to do. Just add a drive in an empty bay or remove a smaller drive and replace it with a larger one.Power of Thunderbolt, Flexibility of USBThunderbolt I/O technology provides performance that no personal storage has been able to achieve, especially one that's portable. This allows you to move large amounts of data in a fraction of the time it used to take. Visit the Thunderbolt technology site to learn more about this exciting new way to connect devices.Drobo Mini is equipped with dual Thunderbolt ports for daisy chaining. Connect up to six Thunderbolt devices and/or a non-Thunderbolt monitor at the end of the chain. This allows even the most portable laptop computers access to high-performance storage while retaining connectivity to other devices and an external monitor. The bidirectional 10 Gbps performance of Thunderbolt allows all devices in the chain to achieve maximum throughput.Drobo is the only storage array that offers Thunderbolt AND USB 3.0. This latest generation of USB also offers high-performance connectivity and is backward compatibility with any computer running compatible versions of Mac OS X or Windows.Capacity and PerformanceData-Aware Tiering technology, usually reserved for business-class storage solutions, is also available in this portable Drobo. It intelligently uses the high-performance flash in SSDs to accelerate performance of the storage array, allowing applications such as Adobe Premiere and Apple Aperture fast access to data. To keep capacity of the Drobo at a maximum, the Drobo Accelerator Bay accepts an industry-standard mSATA SSD, leaving all four 2.5" drives bays available for high-capacity HDDs.If getting the fastest performance possible is your thing, you can also load up every drive bay with SSDs. Now that would be a screaming fast, portable Drobo.Power Protecting Your Critical DataDrobo doesn't just protect you from a drive failure, but also from potential data loss after a power outage. Often found only in arrays that cost tens of thousands of dollars, Drobo Mini includes a battery that protects all data in memory, or cache, that is, data on its way to the drives. Yes, Drobo Mini actually has room for a big battery (barely).When power spontaneously goes away, the battery keeps the Drobo alive long enough for the data to be written to non-volatile storage, ensuring your important information is safe. This battery recharges itself and is designed to last for the life of the product. ## Features - Portable RAID - Holds 4 x 2.5" SATA I/II/III Drives - Holds 1 x mSATA SSD - 2x Thunderbolt & 1x USB 3.0 - Includes USB 3.0 Cable (Thunderbolt Cable Not Included) - Hot Swappable Drives - Any Drive/Manufacturer/Speed/Spindle - Battery Backup ## Technical Specifications | Specification | Value | |---------------|-------| | Installation Type | External Hard Drive | | Number of Items | 1 | | Item Weight | 2.2 Pounds | | Material Type | Metal | | Color | Metallic | | Cache Memory Installed Size | 3 | | Form Factor | Portable, 2.5-inch | | Hardware Connectivity | USB 3.0 | | Package Type | Standard Packaging | | Hard Disk Form Factor | 2.5 Inches | | Compatible Devices | Desktop | | Specific Uses For Product | Personal | | Digital Storage Capacity | 3000 GB | | Hard Disk Interface | USB 1.1 | | Connectivity Technology | USB, Thunderbolt, SATA | | Additional Features | Portable | ## Images ![Drobo mini: Direct Attached Storage - 4 bay array - USB3 and Thunderbolt ports - Designed for portability. (DR-MINI-1A21) - Image 1](https://m.media-amazon.com/images/I/61lFCv7xhrL.jpg) ![Drobo mini: Direct Attached Storage - 4 bay array - USB3 and Thunderbolt ports - Designed for portability. (DR-MINI-1A21) - Image 2](https://m.media-amazon.com/images/I/31CCLeOB-0L.jpg) ![Drobo mini: Direct Attached Storage - 4 bay array - USB3 and Thunderbolt ports - Designed for portability. (DR-MINI-1A21) - Image 3](https://m.media-amazon.com/images/I/41pGi0bL3+L.jpg) ![Drobo mini: Direct Attached Storage - 4 bay array - USB3 and Thunderbolt ports - Designed for portability. (DR-MINI-1A21) - Image 4](https://m.media-amazon.com/images/I/41RknOhTxlL.jpg) ![Drobo mini: Direct Attached Storage - 4 bay array - USB3 and Thunderbolt ports - Designed for portability. (DR-MINI-1A21) - Image 5](https://m.media-amazon.com/images/I/41pVufqU9HL.jpg) ## Customer Reviews ### ⭐ 1.0 out of 5 stars Warning: Run. Run. Run. Unstable, Flakey, Case Cracked *by J***N on Reviewed in the United States on February 6, 2014* 25 year user of mac osx.... used numerous hardware and software based raids ... can setup up storage and recover data from the command line. Before I use any new device for storage, I thoroughly test it. Good thing I did with this one.Purchased the product to use as a simple storage array for a work imac. Nothing more than any basic homeowner or small business would do with it. Just expected smallish storage array with easy to manage software.Of course I upgraded everything to most recent drobo firmware and software. My osx machine is up to date with mavericks. Before any drobo company employees chime in... no, there is nothing wrong with my osx machine.Numerous problems.Drobo would not mount reliably. There was no rhyme or reason to it. Not good for your data.After multiple attempts was able to mount drobo and use drobo software to create storage array.Drobo would then mount and could see the disks presented to osx in Disk Utility DU. I could copy test files to it (2, 1TB disks which I assumed the drobo mirrored). Get them off, etc. Everything seemed fine but things got flakey after a couple of restarts (drobo software would not detect drobo box, blah, blah, blah). Restart it again, and then it would.So I figured I would corrupt a disk and see what happened. After all that is the point of redundancy.But on further testing, dropping or adding disks would cause drobo to drop out of DU and required a multiple restarts to until the disk was even recognized by DU (not to mention the drobo software). You do not want to have to restart your computer in order to control your storage array (and when I say control, I simply mean let the operating system mount it, so the drobo can then deal with it).Drobo then demands more disks (you better have some spares ready to go). This is where it became apparent that the data on the remaining disks was likely gone. Even though I had an additional disk/volume formatted to have a self created backup in the drobo, it would not mount that volume (which it mounted perfectly before the test disk crash). So, I couldn't even get to the backup volume that I had created with an additional disk. This is unacceptable. In the software there appeared to be a backup of the data on a separate disk (I know it was there because I transferred it by hand before i test crashed a disk) and I had no way of getting to see it (it wouldn't mount in DU).After this part, I got fed up. I would never feed the software another disk, knowing that I had a disk available that should have had a valid dataset on it. I think that was just an illusion, because that volume never appeared again in DU. I did not take that drive and test it in another machine to see if I could recover data using some other tools, because it was apparent that this system is way too unsafe for any data (and I shouldn't have to go use another machine to see what is on the disks). I just don't trust it.I expect when the stuff hits the fan you will lose data with this device. You are probably going to lose all of it. It was so unstable (its been a while since I had any disks that were so flakey across restarts) that it was hard to predict exactly what it was going to do. Maybe I got a bad drobo box. Even if that was the case, I think you are dealing with a drobo only system. Which means that if your drobo box does not do it for you (or maybe even breaks), you may never get your disk data back (easily or ever).I quit, took out the drive, went to box it up, and found a crack starting to run across the top of the drobo. It was not there when I started. And no, I didn't throw it. It just sat on the table the entire time. I probably shuffled the disks a dozen times total (including some other tests I ran) and the plastic was cracking.I have no comments on other drobo devices, but that is my experience with this one.Make a good and regular off-site (or at least off-drobo) backup of your data. If you use the drobo mini, I suspect you will need it. Of course you should be doing this with any type of storage you care about, but I wouldn't back burner it with this device. ### ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐ 5.0 out of 5 stars Finally a Drobo too fast for me to benchmark! *by T***4 on Reviewed in the United States on November 11, 2012* Drobo technology has finally matured. I've owned Drobos in the past and they were great for backup but not fast enough to use as primary storage. That all changed with the Drobo Mini for me. When I benchmarked it using Blackmagic I realized the limiting factor was actually the i/o on the internal SSD on my Macbook Pro and Macbook Air because transfers to the Drobo Mini were maxing it out. With SSDs the Mini was just crazy fast. With the Seagate Momentus hybrid HDDs and an mSATA cache Drobo Mini is extremely fast as well although the writes are definitely a bit slower than if you use just SSDs which is of course up to you. Bottom line is that bottleneck will no longer be the Drobo - it will likely by the media you use (the SSD or HDDs), the i/o of your computer, or the Thunderbolt or USB interfaces themselves. Of course I love the fact that the Drobo Mini is also finally small enough to fit neatly on my desk under my monitor and is quite to boot (especially with those SSDs). And of course I should mention you get all the benefits of the Drobo software which offers the concepts of redundancy and thin provisioning without any of the headache.I think this is a great solution especially for any creative pros who have large Aperture or Lightroom libraries or lots of video, especially now that Macbook Pro internal hard drives are fairly small. I am using it both for Aperture, other primary files storage including virtual machines and also as a TimeMachine target.Only hitch I ran into out of the box was that I needed to download a new version of Drobo Dashboard for my computer to see the new Drobo Mini (make sure you have at least v 2.3.2 from drobo.com/start). I think they could have explained this better in the documentation. No other issues so far (I should mention I tried inserting the SSDs upside down at first which was embarrassing--so if you have trouble getting the Drobo Mini to recognize your SSDs or HDDs just make sure you don't have the drives flipped upside down :) This is easy to do with Crucial m4 SSDs I should add since they have stickers on both sides). Anyhow, everything else is good but I'll update this review or write another one if anything changes. ### ⭐⭐⭐⭐ So far, so good... *by R***R on Reviewed in Canada on August 20, 2015* Had this for a couple of months, and it does work as advertised. Was not too painful to set up. Formatted HFS+ as main user is a mac video editing workstation. (Thunderbolt) I also have a USB3 cable attached to it, and when I power down the Mac, and then plug the USB into a Win8.1 workstation the drive is detected and works fine ( I have Paragon HFS driver installed in Windows, so it can read and write to it. Speeds are fine ( I'm using four 7200rpm WB black mechanical drives) - about 200 write and 250 read in both OS X and Windows. ( tested with BlackMagic disk speed test). The Drobo dashboard works fine in OS X and in Windows.The only complaint I have is that this thing RUNS HOT. The bottom of the unit will almost burn you if you touch it ( you could certainly fry an egg on it!) and the fans run constantly. And the fans are LOUD, very loud!!! I have this unit pushed way to the back of my desk, and its still annoying. Ideally this should be in a closet somewhere... Also, the power button is awkwardly placed ( especially when you have to locate this thing 'as far away as possible' to try to ameliorate the noise!). Great unit for deaf people, though. --- ## Why Shop on Desertcart? - 🛒 **Trusted by 1.3+ Million Shoppers** — Serving international shoppers since 2016 - 🌍 **Shop Globally** — Access 737+ million products across 21 categories - 💰 **No Hidden Fees** — All customs, duties, and taxes included in the price - 🔄 **15-Day Free Returns** — Hassle-free returns (30 days for PRO members) - 🔒 **Secure Payments** — Trusted payment options with buyer protection - ⭐ **TrustPilot Rated 4.5/5** — Based on 8,000+ happy customer reviews **Shop now:** [https://www.desertcart.at/products/1968329-drobo-mini-direct-attached-storage-4-bay-array-usb3-thunderbolt](https://www.desertcart.at/products/1968329-drobo-mini-direct-attached-storage-4-bay-array-usb3-thunderbolt) --- *Product available on Desertcart Austria* *Store origin: AT* *Last updated: 2026-05-02*