I have a Drobo 2gen 4 bays Usb connected; when I insert new hard drives, drobo dashboard asks me if i want to format the additional drives. Then it asks me to assign a new letter. It shouldn’t. My Drobo is packed with data, which are precious, would it be formatted too? I red that only the first hd would be formatted. Mine are inserted into drobo since a month, but nothing happened. The status tab shows hard drives to to be present, but capacity is limited to the previuolsy installed Hd. Tha actual configuration is with 4 1 Tb Hd, and the capacity tab shows:
1,72 Unallocated space, 306,99 Gb Free Space, 717 Gb Used Space
I am going nuts with this issue. Is my Drobo still working properly?
hi it sounds like drobo dashboard is asking you to format a newly created “volume”, rather than the drives.
can you remember what max volume size you selected when you first set up your drobo?
for example, mine is set at 2tb max per volume, so whenever my storage pool in the drobo increases (such as with an extra drive in an empty slot, or after i upgrade a hard drive to something larger), then i also get a prompt to make a new volume (if its going to push the 2tb limit etc).
what you can do if you want to play safer in the meantime, would be to post back the screenshot that is being shown to you so that some users here could help verify for you, and also to make a backup of your data beforehand, especially if its important anyway.
hopefully this helps a bit,
Thanks. it helps a lot. I have no possibility to do backup because of the dimension of data. This is exacly why I bought Drobo. I will attache screenshot of drobo dashboard asking me stuffs.
Following your suggestion I have upload 4 slides of the screen here: http://imgur.com/a/oFb2Q
- request for formatting
- request for volume creation
- actual drive situation
- actual drive space remaining.
At the moment I have no space for safe backup at the moment, so I am not willing to format, if it is not super safe.
Thanks again for the informations.
thanks for that,
i think this is for the new volumes but can you confirm if your existing and currently working volume is already at drive letter e:?
and could you also please post back a screen of your volumes tab (or if that is not possible, the screenshot of your “my computer” with drive letters and sizes shown?[hr]
also, if your current e: volume is 1tb max then it seems to make sense.[hr]
btw, here are some additional links for you:
(you may have seen the 1st one, which only explains at the high level, though the 2nd one should help)
https://myproducts.drobo.com/article/AA-01399
+
https://myproducts.drobo.com/article/AA-01405
(eg after the unix/linux section)
Thanks. Your explanation seems absolutely plausible, and it is confirmed by the second link provided.
This is the image of my computer required.
http://imgur.com/qbzx86L
ok thanks, it looks like your drobo volume e shows almost 1tb (eg with the 1tb max size per volume)
When everything seemed fixes, a new problem arise… what are dynamic disks? Will I lose data?
hi, i think if you were using things like that or bitlocker on your drobo you would probably already be aware 
as the picture shows ntfs as options and for the new volume (via drobo dashboard) i think this is ok to do.