I figured I would ask here as it is in this forum that I was prompted to purchase a drobo! Question is how long is normal for the yellow (red) and green lights to flash when adding or changing a drive. I added a 1 tb drive to a drobo that previously had 2 1 tb's and 2 500 gigs and 48 hours later it is still flashing. I understand it has to rewrite 1 tb of data (what I had on there) but is that normal for the amount of time? Drobo is working just fine right now, just wondering when the flashing is going to stop.
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drobo question
- Thread starter CultHero
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Once after a move of my Drobo, it acted as if the last drive was not inside, so I popped it out and placed it back in, but the array had to rebuild. It took almost 3 days to rebuild around 600GB of data across 4 1TB HDs. I don't know why it did that, but as it kept my data intact and as long as it doesn't happen again, it doesn't bother me.
I swopped a 1.5TB drive in my Drobo recently and it did take several days to rebuild. If you have the Drobo Dashboard software installed it will give you an estimate of the time to complete under "advanced controls" - It takes a few seconds to change from a progress bar to the estimate.
I think something similar has happened to me. We had a power outage and when I restarted my drobo+mini it seems as it I've lost 1 of my 2 drives. Both lights are green but I don't know which one is acting up and don't want to risk losing any data by taking out and putting back in.
When I verify and repair in disk utility it says that everything is ok but it won't mount.
Is it ok to take out?
If all your Drobo lights are green, everything is working. If any are not on (in my case the light wasn't on), pop them out and pop them back in. All the lights should start flashing as it rebuilds. You had better hope that your data is okay because the Drobo really isn't supposed to handle two simultaneous drive failures.
If the lights are red, your drives have failed.
Is anything accessing the drobo constantly? Accessing the files does slow down the rebuild process significantly.
Why do you think it lost one drive? To find out you could open up drobo dashboard - it will tell you if everything is fine or not.
yes, slow rebuild is normal
I have a 1st Gen Drobo, with 2x1tb and 2x750gb in it. Friday afternoon I popped out one of the 750's and popped in a 1tb. It's been rebuilding ever since. So yeah, 40+ hours is normal, depending on how much data you have.
Just don't take out any other drives until Drobo says it's done.
I have a 1st Gen Drobo, with 2x1tb and 2x750gb in it. Friday afternoon I popped out one of the 750's and popped in a 1tb. It's been rebuilding ever since. So yeah, 40+ hours is normal, depending on how much data you have.
Just don't take out any other drives until Drobo says it's done.
I have another Drobo question and did not want to start a new thread.
If I had a drive that was full and needed to swap it for another new drive how do you know what data is on the drive you had to remove due to it being full?
Maybe I'm missing how it works?
If I had 500 movies on the drobo and needed to remove one drive that was full and put in a new drive. How do I know what's on the drive I removed?
How does this work?
.
If I had a drive that was full and needed to swap it for another new drive how do you know what data is on the drive you had to remove due to it being full?
Maybe I'm missing how it works?
If I had 500 movies on the drobo and needed to remove one drive that was full and put in a new drive. How do I know what's on the drive I removed?
How does this work?
.
I'm not a technical expert, but the data is stripped across the various hard drives, so when you remove one you lose nothing but the safety of a drive failure. Just make sure you always remove the drive with the least space.
Should a hard drive fail when the one is upgrading, you may begin to encounter issues, but I think the Drobo can handle two hard drive failures if you have four drives.
drobo features
According to their site, I think only the DroboPro (the one with 8 drive slots) can handle two drive failures, and that's only if you have that feature enabled. 4 slot Drobo's can only handle one drive failure at a time.
As to srl7741's other question, once you put a drive in Drobo, it becomes part of Drobo's BeyondRAID format. Meaning you cannot pop it out and read it anywhere else, except in another Drobo. Also, and I think this is more to what you're asking, all 4 drives become one big RAID volume, your computer will see only one volume. Each physical hard drive in a Drobo slot does not show up as a single drive on your computer...they all become one. So don't think of it as 4 hard drives in a big multi-drive enclosure, think of it as one big drive.
Hope that helps.
More info: If your Drobo volume is running low on space, then you pull the smallest drive, and replace it with a bigger one. You can play with different size drives at their Capacity Calculator.
According to their site, I think only the DroboPro (the one with 8 drive slots) can handle two drive failures, and that's only if you have that feature enabled. 4 slot Drobo's can only handle one drive failure at a time.
As to srl7741's other question, once you put a drive in Drobo, it becomes part of Drobo's BeyondRAID format. Meaning you cannot pop it out and read it anywhere else, except in another Drobo. Also, and I think this is more to what you're asking, all 4 drives become one big RAID volume, your computer will see only one volume. Each physical hard drive in a Drobo slot does not show up as a single drive on your computer...they all become one. So don't think of it as 4 hard drives in a big multi-drive enclosure, think of it as one big drive.
Hope that helps.
More info: If your Drobo volume is running low on space, then you pull the smallest drive, and replace it with a bigger one. You can play with different size drives at their Capacity Calculator.
That does help thank. I don't see where a Drobo would be a good option for keeping a large movie collection to stream to aTV. Seems when one drive becomes full your movie collection becomes unusable b/c you just removed one drive which was full (full of movies).
One of the drives won't mount. I have 3 (1TB each) and can see 3 in Disk Utility (repair/verify says all is ok with this particular disk). BUT I can only see 2 mounted.
Realisticly though, I know I can only use 2 of the 3 since the 3rd is for backups. The 3rd should mount though, no? Dashboard shows 2 drives mounted but w/ 3 TBs capacity.
The Drobo dashboard only shows 2 drives? Does it show them as 1TB drives? What lights are showing on the front of the Drobo? Should have a green one beside each slot containing a functioning drive.
The Dashboard part that shows the pie chart shows 2 drives. When I click advanced options it shows 3 1TB drives. To answer your 2nd question directly, I will have to wait until I get home.
All lights are green which makes me think I'm making a big deal out of nothing.
Actually, the four slot Drobos can take a second drive failure it there is time to rebuild the redundancy onto the now three drive array. Of course this second redundancy is only achieved if you have enough free space in a three drive setup to handle all the data you had in a four drive setup.
Still, the Drobo isn't a backup solution and shouldn't be used as such. Prepare for a complete system failure at any time.
Chris, Disk Utility can't see the individual disks within Drobo. Drobo only reports back on physical disk.
Are you sure you aren't seeing partitions?
From your pics it looks like Drobo dashboard is working fine - it shows three 1TB drives installed and the pie chart shows how much of the total available space is used (across all partitions).
Your Mac doesn't see the three disks in your Drobo as separate disks - it see Drobo as one big disk of a size chosen when you first format the Drobo. Like any other single disk you can use disk utility to divide this up into partitions that appear as separate volumes. This is what I can see in your screen shots.
The Finder sidebar is showing two volumes mounted which are partitions on the Drobo one is called "Drobo" and the other "Media" - disk utility is also showing both of these and an extra unmounted (greyed out) partition - also called "Drobo".
There are several reasons why this third partition may not be mounted. It may be unformatted space, corrupt etc. If you highlight it in disk utility and press the "i" button it should give the detail of the size and format etc.
After reading this I kind of realized I messed up in the initial setup. So I had to transfer my content onto an external hard drive (6 hours) format drobo into thinking it is actually bigger than the drives I have in there (10 min) and transfer back (6 hours). The transfering took the longest. In the end I have only 1 volume with 3 drives. I appreciate the help.