California-based Drobo today announced the launch of their new Drobo 5N five-bay NAS product. Ars has looked at Drobo's products before, and though we've been impressed with their ease of use, one thing that's always bothered us about the little black boxes has been their speed: for all their slickness, "fast" isn't traditionally a word you'd use to describe Drobo's consumer offerings.

With the 5N, Drobo hopes to change this. The new NAS contains two notable changes to the underlying hardware. Ars spoke with Drobo VP Mario Blandini, who informed us that the processor in the 5N has been beefed up from a dual-core ARM CPU to a "multicore" ARM CPU. More than anything else, this will boost throughput over the older models, as one core of the dual-core ARM CPU had been dedicated to running the Drobo's back-end operating system and BeyondRAID storage system, and the other core ran a virtualized Linux instance which handled all the file shares and front-end IO. Large network file transfers were handled by the front-facing virtualized Linux environment and would quickly peg the single available core of the split-brained CPU, even if the disks weren't being taxed. Older models rarely climbed past 30-40MB per second even in large streaming file transfers.

This shouldn't be a problem with the new model, which uses a faster ARM CPU with more cores available to service IO. In fact, this improvement in CPU is timely, because the other change to the Drobo 5N is the addition of an mSATA port and an optional SSD.

The SSD, if present, will hold the Drobo's operating system and BeyondRAID metadata, and then will be used for hot data caching, using methodology similar to Intel's Smart Response Technology. Frequently accessed blocks will be mirrored onto the SSD for faster reading; the SSD is also used as a write cache to catch incoming data quickly even if the spinning disks are busy. And if the 5N is purchased without an SSD initially, it still tracks file system usage data and can immediately begin mirroring its OS and its hot blocks to cache as soon as an SSD is installed. Any size SSD works, but Drobo has found through testing that 64GB is the ideal size—anything smaller hurts performance, and going bigger doesn't bring much additional benefit.

The 5N will share files via AFP to OS X boxes and SMB to Windows systems (with past boxes, NFS could be enabled by downloading and installing an add-on). The uprated CPU and internals should enable the 5N to saturate its gigabit Ethernet port, something previous-generation consumer Drobo products couldn't hope to do even under the best of circumstances.

The underlying storage technology of the Drobo, a containerized RAID-like striping and mirroring scheme called BeyondRAID (which we've examined in depth before) remains relatively unchanged, though Blandini informed us that Drobo has made substantial changes to the software stack to make the Drobo more efficient, and thus faster. The user-facing front-end environment is based on Wind River Linux, and if past Drobos are any indication, it will be quite friendly to enthusiast hacking (the good kind of hacking!) and custom add-on software.

Hardware wise, the new box looks very much like the Drobo FS, though in addition to the new internals, Drobo has added a two-year warranty, up from one year on its last-generation products (other new Drobo devices, like the mini and the direct-attached 5D, also carry two-year warranties). The 5N carries an MSRP of $599 with no disks and no mSATA SSD, a decrease of about $100 over the standard price of Drobo FS it is intended to replace.