Hi All,
I currently have 2 1st Gen Drobo’s connected to my mac and I am considering upgrading to the Drobo FS but a question I can’t seem to find an exact answer to is what is the max partition size I can create on it?
I currently have my Drobo’s formatted as 16tb HFS+ format but I am lead to believe that the Drobo FS uses EXT3 which has a max partition size of 2tb. Is this correct?
I’m looking to create a 1 partition for the whole of the drive. If this is not the case then this could be a show stopper.
Thanks for any advice given.
You can’t “partition” network storage in the traditional sense. All storage in the DroboFS is indeed EXT3, and you create shares; just like sharing a folder on your computer, there are no limits or quotas involved. It’s just one big pool of storage that everything shares.
According to Wikipedia EXT3 supports up to a 16TB volume size given a 4KB block size (which I verified is the case on the DroboFS). With redundancy baked in, that means we should be fine up to 5 x 4TB hard drives. There is a 2TB limit on file size, but thankfully that’s not an issue for most folks (yet). It should also be noted that if you’re concerned about the 2TB limit impacting Time Machine backups, under the hood Time Machine uses hundreds/thousands of small “band” files, so even for a multi-TB backup you won’t run into problems from the EXT3 filesystem.