Good evening, everyone! Last week, I wrote about my Drobo Mini and indicated that I would provide you with an update once I received the 60 GB SSD that fits into the Drobo Mini’s accelerator bay. The SSD arrived just a couple of days ago. It was very easy to install into the Drobo’s mSATA bay and the only tool required was a penny which I used to twist the lock on the bay to the open position. From there, snapping the SSD into the bay was, well, a snap.
Once installed, the Drobo Dashboard reflected the installation of said SSD. In the screen below, you can see that the mSATA bay is now occupied and the Drobo indicates that the “Hor Data Cache” feature is nows active.
In re-running the performance tests, there was not a massive difference between the Drobo Mini with or without the accelerator. That said, there was some different, with the SSD cache seeming to add a little bit to both read and write statistics, as shown below.
I don’t think this is the whole story, though. The Drobo Mini automatically and continually optimizes what’s stored on the 60 GB SSD cache, so tools like this may not always reflect reality. Really, the best test of all will be to simply use the unit over a prior of time and see how it run, and that’s what I plan to do.