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drobo question

C

CultHero

macrumors 6502
Original poster
Mar 20, 2007
281
1
I don't want to turn my drobo on its side and risk erasing it to get the serial number, therefore drobospace is still no use. I have to say the support on this product is pretty poor from the company. Got great help from this board though.

Anyway, I bought three 500 gig HD's and needless to say am starting to fill them up. I was looking at getting a 1 TB drive but from looking at the drobo literature it will effectively waste the largest drive in its management of data.

So.... am I stuck just buying another 500 gig drive? If I buy two 1 tb drives and replace one 500, how would I erase the 500 so I could sell?
 
you can flip it on its side to get serial, nothing will happen.

I think you have to replace all 3 drives with 1TB model to get them to expand. I'm not sure how Drobo works but I have Ready NAS with X-raid which i believe is similar and on Ready NAS i have to replace 1 drive at a time, let it rebuild then move on to next one. Once last drive is replaced with bigger drive, ReadyNAS starts expansion process and new space is available.

If you want to delete the data, connect it to your Mac and do a secure format and write 00000s to the disk before selling
 
CultHero said:
I was looking at getting a 1 TB drive but from looking at the drobo literature it will effectively waste the largest drive in its management of data.

So.... am I stuck just buying another 500 gig drive? If I buy two 1 tb drives and replace one 500, how would I erase the 500 so I could sell?
Click to expand...

Well, you could buy a 1TB drive now and gain 0.5TB usable space, and later replace one or more of the 500GB drives with 1TB and regain some space then. Only an option if the pricing is right of course... I have no idea about the price difference right now.

Regarding erasing a drive to sell it, this is easy to do from within Disk Utility if you have any way of plugging the drive directly into an OS X box, or connect it through a standard USB or FW case. Is that an option?

CultHero said:
not according to this guy
Click to expand...

Just turn the device off before flipping it... It will work.
 
Just want to emphasize that itickings is correct. Adding 1TB to 3x500GB drives will reserve the size of the largest drive for expansion and redundancy but will free up the 500GB that was previously reserved, so you would gain 500GB.

The most cost effective thing now is to buy a 500GB drive and replace two drives when you can afford to move to 1TB (or larger) drives. Prices are continually dropping. You could buy a second Drobo for the replaced drives.
 
On the Drobo site there is a program that lets you see what you will gain with the addition of each drive. I believe it is called Drobomator or something like that.

I would buy the 1TB and get the most space possible and the replace one of the 500MB as you need it or costs allow it. To me it makes no sense to buy a 500MB now to only have to replace 2 500MB in the future.
 
crotalus99 said:
On the Drobo site there is a program that lets you see what you will gain with the addition of each drive. I believe it is called Drobomator or something like that.

I would buy the 1TB and get the most space possible and the replace one of the 500MB as you need it or costs allow it. To me it makes no sense to buy a 500MB now to only have to replace 2 500MB in the future.
Click to expand...

yea, that won't work through a networked drive though which is how I have the drobo. Thanks for the help though from everyone it makes sense that I add a 500 now and then two 1 tb later.
 
If you run the drobo dashboard software that your drobo comes with you can get the serial number through the software.
 
copperlab said:
If you run the drobo dashboard software that your drobo comes with you can get the serial number through the software.
Click to expand...

It's also printed on a sticker on the box, if you're one of those people who always keeps the box... :)

A.
 
Alrescha said:
It's also printed on a sticker on the box, if you're one of those people who always keeps the box... :)

A.
Click to expand...

Really, I will have to search harder as I couldn't find it. Thanks!

And Drobo Dashboard will not work through a networked drive status
 
Thats one thing that puts me off getting a drobo, I checked on the drobomator thing and if you put 4 1TB drives in each slot, you only get about 3 TB's of space, Drobo is a great idea but it thats kind of annoying. Probilly will still end up getting one, a 3TB's is still alot,
 
polar-blair said:
Thats one thing that puts me off getting a drobo, I checked on the drobomator thing and if you put 4 1TB drives in each slot, you only get about 3 TB's of space, Drobo is a great idea but it thats kind of annoying. Probilly will still end up getting one, a 3TB's is still alot,
Click to expand...

Well, that's kind of the point with the Drobo, automatic protection against a failed drive...

Pretty hard to accomplish that redundancy without sacrificing at least the size of the one drive. If you aren't interested in that feature, there may be other enclosures more suitable.
 
itickings said:
Well, that's kind of the point with the Drobo, automatic protection against a failed drive...

Pretty hard to accomplish that redundancy without sacrificing at least the size of the one drive. If you aren't interested in that feature, there may be other enclosures more suitable.
Click to expand...

I agreee, This is typical of RAID devices, I have a 5 drive system, 1TB drives 3.8 TB of usual space.
 
polar-blair said:
Thats one thing that puts me off getting a drobo, I checked on the drobomator thing and if you put 4 1TB drives in each slot, you only get about 3 TB's of space, Drobo is a great idea but it thats kind of annoying. Probilly will still end up getting one, a 3TB's is still alot,
Click to expand...

Well how else do you think you can protect against drive failure?? You can't do that without losing drive capacity, man.
 
polar-blair said:
Thats one thing that puts me off getting a drobo, I checked on the drobomator thing and if you put 4 1TB drives in each slot, you only get about 3 TB's of space, Drobo is a great idea but it thats kind of annoying. Probilly will still end up getting one, a 3TB's is still alot,
Click to expand...

The Drobo isn't designed to do that. It needs to reserve some space for redundancy so if one of those drives craps out, your data is still there. If you want to put 4 1TB drives together and get 4TB of storage, then you need RAID0. And guess what will happen if one single disk in that RAID0 array dies? You lose all of your data on your 3 good drives. But any redundant solution, which is what the Drobo is, will reserve space like that.

I've got 3 500 GB drives in my Drobo but get 1 TB of storage out of it. That's fine with me, because my data isn't going anywhere should one of those drives die. If I need more storage, I'll just add in a 4th drive, which is really the beauty of the thing. I added the 3rd drive after I already got my Drobo up and running, and I spent more time getting the damn anti-static bag that the drive was in open than it took me to add the drive to my Drobo.
 
exactly what I have. Looks like I will just add another 500 and then when those fill up, two more 1 TB drives. Movies take up a lot of space!
 
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