I know that it may be crazy, but I am hoping and wishing that I will get an opportunity to upgrade my 4Bay Drobo with 3TB drives. I did see the post by epounds in the other thread, but that continues with open ended “we’re working on it”.
Assuming it is true and the 3TB for Drobo v1&2 comes along, what 3TB drives have you thought to try? I am interested in Hitachi 3TB coolspin, 5400RPM 32MB buffer.Based on my previous experience between using faster 7200RPM drives making the Drobo fan run most of the time, I changed to 5900RPM drives that have been running fine and not much fan activity in the Drobo since.
hi yomoma, i’d say check the other specs for the drive too
eg the WD10eads green power had very good specs like noise and energy comsumption.
i couldnt see the energy usage of the coolspins but always worth considering (and working out say a years worth of energy costs) factored into the price of the unit.
Good choice with the Hitachi 5900 cool spins. To be completely honest you can use any 3.5 " sata drive in your Drobo. The Western Digital Green drives are a nice buy and they do run cool. However the faster drives that you put in your drobo, the better performance you will get when accessing files and using your drobo. 7200 RPM drives do run faster, and may get a little warmer which is OK, because the drobo has a cooling fan in th e rear, however the 5900 RPM Hitachi drives i would say looks like it would be a happy medium between saving power without sacrificing to much performance. GOOD CHOICE
I used to have four older Hitachi 7200RPM 1TB drives in my Drobo V1, and I used to have the unit shut down on me on very hot days in the summer (no air conditioning for me 
). I swapped them all out for WD Greens and it stays up and running all day every day now. The 4 bay Drobos (and the V1 in particular) aren’t that great as far as cooling goes, and heat is not good for electronics in general, so I think a lower power option is better all round.
In a Drobo V1 or V2 I really doubt that you would see any really significant difference in speed between any modern drives, the Drobo chassis and BeyondRAID is the real bottleneck on these devices. I’d go with the WD Greens or something similar and get lower power and probably longer life.
@Paul- thanks for the suggestions. It will be helpful to check the Power specs of other drives.
@ccallaway- The linked Hitachi Drive is a 5400rpm, vice 5900rpm. Otherwise, I think it is a good solution. The general consensus on the boards up til now has been that 5400-7200rpm drives perform the same in the 4Bay Drobos speed wise. And that the temperature is an issue in these earlier models, which did have fan problems. So, I don’t think that there is any performance tradeoff, speed-wise.
@Spiney- having had the same experiences with heating as you, I agree with everything you wrote.
If anyone has chosen a 3TB already, to go into their v1/v2 4Bay, I would be interested to know which model and why. Thanks.
no one is running 3TB drives in there 4 bay drobo v2’s because they are not supported yet.
like most, i am waiting for an update which keeps getting pushed further and further back. Do NOT put any 3TB drives in your V2 otherwise you will have problems with your data.
i am surprised that no one had said anything.
Yes. I am aware of all that, but appreciate the advisory, nonetheless. This thread was started to ask which 3TB drive you are planning to use, if, and when, Drobo ever rolls out the update for the 4Bay Drobo to use them.
cool, i would wait for some non green versions of western digitals 3TB drives; then upgrade the whole lot in mine at once, get rid of all the other external drives i have laying around.
NO WAY. The speed of the DROBO is so agonizingly slow compared to any raw drive speed, this is blatantly false. The DROBO speed is the bottleneck, not the drives.
Oh yeah? When I added an ST412 drive to my Drobo, performance was slightly worse.
Edit: oh, I guess that isn’t a 3TB drive…
I think that’s all people have seen in the four-bay systems, slight changes up and down. Putting in drives that are all twice as fast read/write might get you a couple of percent improvement here or there.
Just get the Greens (or something like it) and sit back knowing your Drobo is running just about as fast as anyone else’s, and you are saving power and probably getting a longer life from the equipment.
Specific to the Drobo v2, as I understand it, there is no gain from using 7200rpm over 5900 or 5400rpm, due to the processor involved. But that, in the Drobo S and higher versions, there was gain to be had by using 7200rpm.
I suspect that is what ccallaway’s post, if it included the above, would have been more correct.[hr]
@rdo: Huh? an ST 412? A 10MB hard disk?
http://www.google.com/search?q=ST412&ie=utf-8&oe=utf-8&aq=t&rls=org.mozilla:en-US:official&client=firefox-a
Actually, if you upgrade your Drobo drives without reformatting, one disk at a time (72h x 4 !!), you may very well end with worse performance than when you started, especially if your Drobo is above 60% full.
This is independent of the speed of the new drives, and related to the internal fragmentation of the Drobo, which gets worse with usage, upgrades and occupancy.
Data Robotics has been very laconic on this subject, but there are multiple threads in this forum and elsewhere pointing to that issue. See for instance this thread.
The only way to avoid this performance problem seems to get hold, at least temporarily, of a 2nd Drobo, format it clean with the 4 new disks, and move in bulk the data from the previous Drobo to the new one; then migrate the new disk set with the copied data to the original Drobo.
Obviously, being forced to do that to preserve performance, you loose most of the vaunted benefit of the Drobo, namely the smooth progressive upgrade path…
You caught my joke. 
I really did have an ST412 drive once. It had an MFM interface, as used in the original IBM PC/XT. It was also larger than the Drobo itself.
I think it would slow down darned near anything that touched it: Drobo, human, or getaway car. I used it as a doorstop for a while.
i remember the quantum firebal drives - they were like a flying carpet you could stand on
not to mention the choc block of an amiga 500 drive
http://www.computinghistory.org.uk/userdata/images/large/PRODPIC-11388.jpg
Hey, the Drobo Calculator for 4bay just got updated with 3TB drives! Must have been int he last day or two.
http://www.drobo.com/calculator/4-bay/index.php
looks promising
has the support page about 3TB drive timetables been updated too?[hr]
btw on that drobolator page (bottom right, theres a side bar link about 3TB support)
looks like a bit more time to go but looking promising[hr]
http://support.datarobotics.com/app/answers/detail/a_id/506
Indeed, it does look like the 2 TB limit will finally be broken soon in the 4 bays. However, I’m wondering as to whether it’s time to upgrade the drives, or buy a new unit (like the Drobo S or a competitor) and just keep the Drobo FW800 that I have as it is. There’s nothing wrong with the 2 TB Green drives in the Drobo now and they are far from obsolete. And the current Drobo’s lack of speed makes me wonder if I should get something faster. Granted, the old Drobo isn’t doing anything that requires a lot of speed…it’s mainly a repository for my iTunes library and ripped DVD archive. But with a new iMac being budgeted in my house for the next quarter, I have to wonder what is coming down the pike, especially in the Thunderbolt class. Yes, the Promise Pegasys is shipping but it’s expensive and I imagine it won’t be long before we see a few choices in the marketplace. Right now, all I need is 3 TB of extra storage and I’d need to buy 2 3TB drives just to push the capacity needle in my old Drobo now.
No
No, but there’s no reason to update the timeframe until the end of this year…