Will the Seagate 3TB HDDs be supported by Drobo Pro ? I’m pretty sure they will probably just because the interface will be SATA…but just asking.
This has been mentioned in several threads
Basically, in theory yes
In practise, some seagate drives have caused issues previously and it’s probably best practise to wait for DRI to qualify the drives for use.
Did you buy one and crack it open yet? I want to, but waiting for someone else to do it and report on it.
thanks. to crack open what a HDD or a Drobo ? 
i wouldn’t use one of the currently shipping external drives,they are all 5-platter affairs and probably produce far too much heat
I didn’t know they were shipping 3Tb external drives. I am waiting for the desktop version. I tought the 3TB ext was formed from 2 raid0 1.5TB drives
no, they have just started selling the 3tb goflew which is a single disk 3tb drive, but only the external variety,so i suspect this probably means either thats where the largest profit margins are , or that they produce a lot of heat at the moment so external is probably best for them.
either way ,tempting though it is to crack them and put them in drobo,i’m waiting for cooler drives.
http://www.trustedreviews.com/storage/news/2010/06/29/Seagate-Launches-First-3TB-HDD-Backup-Drive/p1[hr]
oh and of course a lot of computers (BIOS) cant work with drives above 2.1gb so having it as external gets around that.
nice. Then I am waiting for someone to crack one open too… I guess
i suspect while we are still at the “cracking one open” that DRI wont be qualifying these drives. they will only go to the trouble of OKing a drive once they are actually for sale as SATA units. and personally,i wouldn’t put a drive (ESPECIALLY a seagate) into a drobo until DRI say they are ok to use.
Some recent information. Sounds like it will be hotter, as you surmised.
3TB Mammoth Hard Disk Drive
02 July, 2010, by Desire Athow
We managed to get hold of some saucy details about the company’s latest and biggest storage device, the 3TB FreeAgent GoFlex Desk External Drive.
So here we go; the drive comes with five platters of 600GB each with ten heads. This confirms another report from IBTimes four days ago. also mentioned that the sector sizes have been increased to 4k bytes of data.
The platters spin at 7200rpm, way faster than the 5900rpm that we saw on some 2TB external hard disk drives on the market. Onboard cache
is 64MB, read speeds top 130MBps and write speeds reach 24MBps (that’s USB only) . Random read seek time stands at a high 11ms while random write seek time reaches 17ms.
The fact that the the drive spins at 7200rpm and has 64MB cache almost certainly means that it is a yet-to-be-announced Barracuda XT drive, rather than the entreprise-bound Constellation model. As for power consumption, it stands understandably high because of the number of platters.
Average idle power, we found out, stands at 7w while average operating power hovers around 13w, which is 40 percent higher than for the 2TB Baraccuda XT drive. Unfortunately, we weren’t able to get much more information, especially over acoustics, availability and pricing.
Yeah 13w is (relatively) huge!
I did crack one of the 3TB GoFlex externals open and tried it in a Drobo FireWire/USB version and it did report a 3TB drive, but said “replace bad drive” for about 10 minutes (flashing red) so I think there is an issue at least with the FireWire Drobo (Firmware 1.3.7). I pulled it and put the 2TB drive back in and it is showing “Data protection in progress”.
If anyone has any suggestions to try, I’m willing to try a few things.
I may try it with the DroboPro, but I have not decided if I want to do so yet.
The simple way to do it, is to remove ALL the disks from your drobpro (with it powered down!)… Put them to one side… Then just run testing with your single 3tb drive, see if drobopro recognises it, can format it, can read and write data etc etc
When you are done, power down, remove the 3tb drive, put your whole good disk pack back in, and away you go :D[hr]
As for the replace bad drive error, i wonder if the 3tb drive is simply trying to pull too mich power, im not sure what kind of power regulation drobos have, but seagates huge and hot drive may have exceeded what it was expecting/can supply
A more recent review and insight into the Seagate 3TB.
http://www.anandtech.com/print/3858
They report the heat being a HUGE factor.
I really need to expand my Drobov2, and was looking forward to this.
those drives carry quite a price premium too, you would probably be almost as well off putting your v2 on ebay and getting a 5 bay drobo
I went through 6 seagate drives in the mater of a month with my drobo pro to finally get a set of them that is now still working…
they were all 1tb but I only worry a 3 will be even more of an issue…
All I can say is thank you dual disk redundancy… or I would have lot of pile of data…