Data storage company Drobo is announcing the beginning of pre-orders for its Mini and 5D arrays, which we got to check out at its headquarters last month. The products are its first to add Thunderbolt (in addition to USB 3.0), and like its others, they let you use multiple disks of various speeds and capacities to keep a redundant backup of all your files. The approach, while expensive, gives you more protection against disk failure than a single backup drive, but is simpler to build and maintain than most RAID options.

The bigger 5D starts at $849 and takes up to five 3.5-inch drives, as well as a single optional SSD over mSATA to speed things up. The smaller Mini is the company's first design to use smaller 2.5-inch laptop drives, resulting in a much smaller, portable package. Otherwise, it has the same bay for an optional SSD, and starts at $649. Pre-orders are available right away (a list of retailers is available at the source link below), but there are still a couple of months to wait — Drobo is planning to ship "by the end of September."