Is that new hard drives from Western Digital “WD Red” with a capacity of 6TB are used in the “Drodo 5D?”
hi, i think they are still being tested,
Correct, I can advise that we do have some 6TB drives in house that are still being qualified for use with our products. I have not been given a time frame yet as to when it will be done qualifying, but will provide an update as soon as I get official word from the development team.
Any word on if WD Red 6 TB is qualified for use in Drobo 5D?
Currently no update as of yet on the qualification of 6 TB drives in the Drobo units. We will be posting an announcement on the forums when QA testing has been completed with the 6 TB drives.
Thank you for your patience,
Drobo / Transporter Support
just thinking about this, there is probably a lot more that needs to go on behind the scenes as part of the testing, than we might first feel.
eg, to be able to qualify a drive for marketing etc, and say it supports any xTB drive, will probably entail at least the following:
- identifying existing drive manufacturers with 6tb drives
- identifying existing drive manufacturers with 6tb in the works.
- identifying each model of 6tb from the manfactuers
- identifying each firmware version of those drives
- requesting collabaoration for each such instance of drive
- collaborating with manufactuers to receive production test models (or shipped units) for testing
- running each drive version, across each drobo model, version number, and dashboard (designated as supportable) for a mimimum amount of runtime. (probably in hours but maybe longer)
- creating a test script for each instance
- subjecting each test-case to each test script, covering a wide range of usage, from expected use (read, write, add a drive etc), to testing every feature, (rebuilds, sdr > ddr < sdr) etc
- running each test across different (designated supportable) operating systems/filesystems (though some underlying drobo system might be the same)
- identifying bugs found in each such instance
- replicating / reproducing said bugs, and documenting them
- collaborating with said manufacturers to point fingers
oops i mean, to iron out the issues privately (most likely) - awaiting new versions from drive makers, and or drobo dev teams
- re-testing (x-times) to make sure issue is resolved
- repeat accordingly
and this is just for those manufacturers with with drobo has a good working relationship and with both teams keeping the ball rolling
just some thoughts 
Thanks for the progress report. I decided to go with the new WD Red 4 TB Pro drives with 5 year warranty. So far so good. Maybe in a few years I will go for the 6 TB drives.
Here is to hoping they are using the extra time to make some modifications to BeyondRAID to allow user-selectable volume sizes and >16TB single volumes.
Just installed my new WD 6 TB drive aside 4 existing 4 TB drives: of course no capacity improvement for I should have a 2nd 6 TB drive to see that, but other than that so far so good.
Are there any updates on 6 tb drives in a Drobo. I am holding off on upgrading to an 8 bay until I hear if they will work.
Thank you in advance.
There is a post about larger disks
http://support.drobo.com/app/answers/detail/a_id/506/
What I am not sure of is that the post states the 5D can do “Drobo 5D: 32TB” but the dashboard would only let me create a 16TB partition??
I just bought 3x6TB disks, will add them with 2x2TB disks should be an actual size of 20TB with 14.5TB of usable space??? will update with results.
hi, i believe it means that the 5d can support 32tb’s MAX of total usual advertised drive capacity.
eg if a drive is being advertised as a 4tb drive, then you could have only 8 of them (slots and firmware permitting of course)
so if dashboard has a 16tb volume/partition limit, then if you had enough drives/capacity installed in the drobo, id assume it would let you make another 16tb volume, for the remaining space.
simple math i’d use for single SDR redundancy mode, and 5 drives of 6tb is this:
= 4 drives of 6tb available for data = 24tb (x0.9 overheads) = about 21.6tb for actual data
= 2x 16tb volumes (though the 2nd volume would NOT actually have 16tb for you to reliably use, it would be less by general rule of thumb)
simple math i’d use for dual DDR redundancy mode, and 5 drives of 6tb is this:
= 3 drives of 6tb available for data = 18tb (x0.9 overheads) = about 16.2tb for actual data
= i think 2x 16tb volumes (though the 2nd volume would NOT actually have 16tb for you to reliably use, it would be a lot less by general rule of thumb)[hr]
edit, that approximate 0.2tb may or may not be enough to push it into needing a 2nd volume…
As posted in another thread…
The chassis supports 32TB of storage.
BeyondRAID only supports volumes of 16TB.
If you have a 5D with 5x6TB, you will have at least 2 volumes. 1 16TB volume and 1 ~8.5TB volume.
You cannot have a single volume on any Drobo device (5D, 5N, 800i, 800FS, 1200i) larger than 16TB.