Performance and Testing
CrystalDiskMark
The read/write speeds of the Drobo 5C isn’t too bad. It’s roughly 4-5 times faster than my WD external USB 3.0 hard drive. Of course, you can’t expect the Drobo 5C to beat its Thunderbolt brother – the Drobo 5Dt.
I have have no complaints here, the Drobo 5C is performing as expected.
ATTO Disk Benchmark
For our ATTO disk test … the Drobo 5C tells a different story. It’s actually better than I expected. It produced a read speed of 213.89Mb/sec and write speed of 263.68Mb/sec. That’s literally half the speed of most internal SSDs. Pretty impressive!
Anvil Disk
To get a measurement of the IOPS scores (Input/Output Operations Per Second), we used Anvil Storage Utilities. The IOPS (4K QD16) for read is quite low at only 185.02, while the IOPS (4K QD16) for write reached 920.16.
The low score in Anvil doesn’t mean the Drobo 5C’s performance is poor, quite the opposite. When I actually transfer a large video file of more than 2-3Gb in size, I can physically see the speed difference … I think the Anvil Storage Utilities is really more suited for SSD benchmarking.
In Comparison
| Drobo 5C | Dell XPS 13 (M.2 SSD) | Adata XPG SX930 SSD | WD Passport External USB3.0 |
||
| CrystalMark | Read | 147.8 | 520.9 | 521.6 | 23.67 |
| Write | 146.1 | 68.16 | 459.7 | 21.97 | |
| ATTO Disk Benchmark | Read | 213.89 | 545.35 | 520.67 | 23.12 |
| Write | 263.68 | 195.25 | 457.88 | 21.68 | |
| Anvil Disk Test | Read IOPS | 185.02 | 58,906 | 52,412 | 108.18 |
| Write IOPS | 920.16 | 9,486 | 71,239 | 180.33 | |
As you can see from the table, there’s a definite speed improvement over the external USB 3.0 hardware. Of course, you can’t really beat the speed of an internal SSD. Still, for an external storage device that utilizes the USB-C interface, I think the Drobo 5C has covered that niche very well.
