Disk pack migration from 5-bay to 4-bay

Forum History Direct Attached Storage (DAS) Forums
1

Hello,

I understand that the table on this page says I can’t migrate from a 5-bay to a 4-bay. However, I’m wondering if it actually does work in practice if the disk pack in the 5-bay unit only consists of 4 drives.

I have a Drobo S with a failed USB 3.0 port. The Firewire port appears to work fine at this point. The Drobo S has five disks currently (four 4TB and one 5TB). Ideally, I would like to do the following:

[list]
[]Remove 5TB drive from faulty Drobo S
[]Allow faulty Drobo S to relayout data with remaining four 4TB drives
[]Back up faulty Drobo S data to removed 5TB drive
[]Migrate the four-disk pack from faulty Drobo S to new Drobo USB 3.0 4-Bay
[/list]

Is this possible in reality? I know the migration table says it isn’t, but I don’t see why not. Thanks!

2

If the Drobo Firmware has some kind of metadata written into the Disk Pack denoting this Disk Pack is created by which Dorbo Model. And if there is some form of checks … then I would say is UNLIKELY that you can migrate a

5-Bay Drobo Model with ONLY 4 Drives into a 4-Bay Drobo Model.

I don’t think anyone has try to do what you mention before in this forum. Not that I know of…

3

hi, certainly you would not want to risk it (especially if you only had your data on the drobo and no backups etc etc), though it is an interesting question :slight_smile:

usually each feature that a product does, gets listed. (e.g. if you want to buy a new car, the sales pitch has all the extras listed out if it includes them) and likewise, some deduplication solution companies, usually dont list any costing information at all, because its either a very complex process that has a lot of “what if” dependencies, or it’s very very costly and they do not want to put people off on the first visit. :slight_smile:

for the drobo though, i think that if any model was to have a decent chance of supporting something like that, it might be the new gen3 but im not sure and definitely not worth taking the risk with critical data - maybe its already been tested and was not possible, or had too many potential repurcussions, but an interesting question indeed.