This replication can involve any type of block device, such as hard drives, partitions, RAID setups, or logical volumes.

[6] This transition may require a subsequent verification of the integrity of the file system stacked on top of DRBD, by way of a filesystem check or a journal replay.

When the failed ex-primary node returns, the system may (or may not) raise it to primary level again, after device data resynchronization.

DRBD's synchronization algorithm is efficient in the sense that only those blocks that were changed during the outage must be resynchronized, rather than the device in its entirety.

When a storage device fails, the RAID layer chooses to read the other, without the application instance knowing of the failure.

A DRBD can be used as the basis of: DRBD-based clusters are often employed for adding synchronous replication and high availability to file servers, relational databases (such as MySQL), and many other workloads.

[14] After a lengthy review and several discussions, Linus Torvalds agreed to have DRBD as part of the official Linux kernel.