I have OSX 10.9.4
8GB unit with 3x 2TB and 1x 1TB. The newest drive is in the 4th bay and is 2TB. All Western Digital. First 3 are Black Caviar (2tb, 2tb, 1tb) and the 4th is a Green 2tb.
My drobo is in data protection mode and is fluctuating between 55-60 hours remaining. It’s been working for the last 10 hours. It started at around 70 hours so the countdown seems accurate.
I have a drive that I inserted over a year ago that I thought was being used but my drobo dashboard is saying I have a drive that needs to be formatted. I believe it must be the 4th drive I inserted because my unit is showing 4.52TB space/3.10TB used where it should be 7tb.
Should I reformat the drive my dashboard is telling me to? Does drobo know which drive? The dashboard won’t show me which drive needs it. Will it erase any data that may be on it?
Can I reformat when it’s in data protection mode?
Is 60-70 hours for the data protection process unusually long for the amount of data I have? I’m naturally very concerned about the health of my drives and my data.
You seem to have misread something or confused some OS message with a Drobo Dashboard message. Drobo Dashboard doesn’t prompt user to format particular drives, as far as I know. After insertion of a drive that hasn’t been used in this particular Drobo, it immediately incorporates the drive into the diskpack and you lose any data that might have been there previously. What you probably see is a prompt from the OS to format a volume newly created by Drobo after you’ve expanded your storage past the “virtual” volume size you’ve picked during the initial Drobo setup. If you’ve picked 4TB then (bad decision, you should’ve gone for 16TB straight away), you’ll end up with a new 4TB volume each time you cross the multiple of 4TB of total space boundary.
The 60-70 hours long rebuild time doesn’t seem unusual but is greatly affected by how much you are accessing the data on Drobo while it’s doing that. To shorten the data protection time, don’t use your Drobo until it finishes.
The time it says to do data protection is in line with my previous drive failures and rebuilds in the past (I have a Drobo Gen II). Rebuilds take a few days. If you use the drive (and especially if you write data to the drive), it will take longer…sometimes a lot longer. Be patient.
As others here have stated, the rebuild times appear to be within what’s expected. You can’t format a drive while you are in data protection mode and you will want to wait for that process to finish before altering any of your Drobo settings.
If you need the full capacity of the Drobo a copy off and pin hole reset may be needed. Do you have other storage devices to do this ?