You would be forgiven for thinking that it would have happened sooner, given that the Drobo devices have been so popular with Apple users in general. There are many creative professionals already using Drobo raid storage devices for working with video and high-end photography. Seeing as so many creative professionals prefer to use Macintosh computers, just by joining the dots together you would expect Drobo to have a range of Thunderbolt storage devices available pretty quickly. Data Robotics, Drobo finally announced there will be a Thunderbolt raid Drobo style.

Thunderbolt storage devices – Drobo review

Drobo have announced the Drobo 5D and the Drobo Mini in a June Drobo 2012 event. With the same BeyondRAID technology that gives you single or dual drive redundancy and the ability to add or hot swap drives in the event of hard drive failures. I have one of the pre Thunderbolt storage devices and it has worked extremely well for protecting my important data files. It can only be a good thing to finally have Drobo and Thunderbolt technology available in the same device.

The new Drobo Thunderbolt storage devices are available with two Thunderbolt ports making it possible to daisychain up to 6 Thunderbolt supported devices. You could easily have two or three Drobo Thunderbolt storage devices linked to your computer through the Apple Thunderbolt cable as well as an Apple Thunderbolt display. Why not even add the Belkin Thunderbolt device into the daisychain also. Interestingly, with the Drobo 5D you also have the USB 3 available as extra connectivity. Maybe Drobo are hedging their bets by adding USB 3 and expanding their market into the PC end of things too.

Faster and faster Thunderbolt raid Drobo

In the same way that you can buy hard drives that have some solid state memory, you can add high-performance flash to accelerate performance of the Drobo storage array. It is a new industry standard mSATA SSD that will accelerate performance of the Drobo Thunderbolt storage devices. This extra memory is also there to give extra protection for the data as it is passed through to the magnetic disk-based drives.

Thunderbolt raid Drobo is battery protected

If the power to the drive is suddenly cut, there is a battery which will keep the Drobo alive long enough for data to be written to non-volatile storage. This is extremely important for making sure your vital data is kept completely safe. The battery has been designed to recharge itself and last for the lifetime of the Drobo Thunderbolt storage device.

Drobo Thunderbolt storage devices – Finally! awe.sm/d0b48

— David  Allen (@wizardgold) July 2, 2012

When is Drobo coming out with Thunderbolt device?

Drobo users will be delighted to hear that there will be a Drobo with a Thunderbolt port available for sale in July of 2012. There are two new Drobo Thunderbolt storage devices, the Drobo 5D and the interesting looking Drobo Mini. The Drobo Mini will take two and a half inch drives and is more of a portable design. I can see that these will be incredibly popular with Mac users that have bought the new MacBook Pro with Retina Display. The two and half inch drives could even be solid state devices giving you a Drobo Thunderbolt SSD. A Drobo Thunderbolt hard drive in this configuration would be screamingly fast. This would be perfect for a video editor working on the road, making video magical creations. Add a Black Magic Thunderbolt Intensity Extreme and things are looking very good indeed for Drobo Thunderbolt 2012.