I have a couple of 2Tb drives in caddies, and am migrating them into my new Drobo 5D.
It would be nice if the Drobo recognised an existing filesystem on an inserted drive, and asked me if I wanted to assimilate it rather than just over-writing it. Once copied into my Drobo volume, the drive could then be added.
I’m doing this manually at the moment, but it’s quite time consuming.
At the back of my mind is the “Brennan JB7” music system. When you insert a CD, it assimilates it into its internal hard drive (that’s essentially the main purpose of the JB7)
I realise that this would involve quite a significant effort to implement; you’d need to be able to specify where you wanted the files to be imported to, and you’d need a way of handling the myriad ways that disk-to-disk copying can go wrong…
But it would be very civilised.