I have a new Drobo 5N that I have only 4 drives in. Everything is green, healthy, and has sufficient capacity. If one of those drives goes am i protected?
I ask because that would mean two empty slots and I’m only in one drive failure mode. Thanks!
Yes. You don’t have to fill all the slots in order to be protected. The Drobo works with what you give it, so a new user could insert just two drives and be protected against the failure of either of them.
If one of your four drives fails the remaining three will already contain enough information to ensure that you don’t lose any data. Furthermore, once in that state of having a failed drive and provided there remains sufficient capacity the Drobo will rearrange the data across the remaining drives in an attempt to protect against further failure. This is a strategy that differs from most competing RAID systems, which simply sit there in degraded mode waiting for you to replace the failed drive.
We recommend a minimum of 3 drives in Drobo. I would also like to offer our Best Practices guide for more information on how to protect your data.