I received the warning that my drive in slot 2 needed replacing as there wasn’t enough room to provide adequate backup of my data.
I’ve just installed a Western Digital 6Tb drive in slot 2 of my Drobo 5D and it is now prompting me, “There is a new volume on your Drobo device that needs to be formatted. Would you like to format it now?”
The documentation I’ve read says that once you install the first set of drives and go through the formatting process, after that, you don’t need to format any future drives as you install them.
I notice when I first went to click on “Yes” it showed that I would be formatting all 16Tb of the Drobo!
hi, while a format usually happens when first settings things up, (as well as usually starting out with an initial selection with regards to the maximum volume size to be used) there is also a chance that adding larger drives into the drobo, will lead to also increasing the usable space, to beyond the size of the max volume size.
in those cases, a new volume (with the same max volume size) would be created (and also need to be formatted by dashboard)
for example, when i set my drobo 5D up, i chose 2TB max virtual volume size, as that was what i needed and preferred.
with a 2TB drive + a 2TB drive, it gave me 4TB raw capacity
4TB, -2TB (the size of one of my largest drives), gave me 2TB of actual capacity (wiith the default SDR protection)
2TB (x0.9 for some filesystem overheads) = about 1.8TB which fits fine within my starting 2TB volume.
when i added a 3rd drive of 2TB into it the other day,
that pushed up my usable space beyond the 2TB limit, and dashboard asked me to restart and to create and format another volume (of 2TB max) and for me to choose a drive letter.
as long as dashboard is prompting you to do something similar (and not disk manager or another operating system program), it should be ok. (in your case, you might simply have 16TB as your initial default max volume size, though if you are not sure, please feel free to post back some more info about what drives you have and any other info you have about your drobo, and we can have a closer look.
what usually helps too is to post some screenshots of how the drobo shows up on your computer (like how finder reports the size of the drobo, or what is shown in details view in explorer / my computer) along with taking some screenshots of the dashboard window tabs/area and to upload them to imgur or similar, with links pasted here.
(if you do though, please remember to rub out any sensitive/serial mumbers before uploading, to play safe)