Hi Drobo team & community,
What exactly is the drobo doing when I’m not using it (it’s not mounted and not connected to a computer)? Lots of disk activity. Is it reorganizing stuff? Why does it do this periodically?
Thanks 
-Jay
Relayout (in Drobo terms, sometimes called Initialization in other systems) is establishment of fault-tolerance.
So it’s not doing a relayout… but since the manual says it handles defragmentation on its own, I suspect it’s doing some kind of defrag/optimization run periodically.
It also does its own error-checking, so it could be doing a drive-integrity test as well.
Thanks for the quick reply. The only thing i dislike about this is performance during this period.
For instance, I can’t stream firewire from my camera to the drobo at the same time during this activity window.
i would not have expected background processes to impact performance, unless the lights and flashing green-orange during a rebuild, i would have expected “housekeeping” by drobo to only be done during idle time.
i may be worth opening a support case and submitting and log file so DRI can tell you exactly what its up to.