Drobo Gen 1 OSX Questions

Forum History Drobo
1

Hello all,

Not much of a power user but hoping for some insight and best practice advice.

I use two Gen 1 Drobos connected to two Macs at home. Each have 4x2tB WD Green Caviar drives in them.

One is located in the TV room and basically holds my entire DVD collection.

The other is in my home office and is intended to be a backup of the other Drobo.

The drives in each are labelled as A,B and C.

What is the optimum way to use my Drobo’s here?

Currently the iTunes library boots from Drive A. Drives B and C are barely used.

This drive is almost at capacity.

Should I split the data across all three drives evenly?

If so, how do I tell iTunes to look at all three drives?

My configuration means that three separate drives boot on my Desktop. Is this correct? Or should I just see the drive as one big drive?

I am pretty confused and am hoping someone here can give me some good advice.

Thanks!

Eric in London

2

when you say drives - should i assume that you mean “volume” ? i.e the drive letter / whatever that you see in your computer’s finder/explorer?

the data on your drobo is already split across all the disks in drobo - the logical spilt into three volumes doenst affect that.

you can move some of your data from one volume to another if you wish - just to stop you from running our of room, but basically you are pretty much fine as you are

the fact that you see three volumes is because when you first set up drobo - you used the default 2tb volume size, so it will carry on making “new” 2tb volumes everytime you increase the space in drobo.

there is no way to change this apart from completely wiping your drobo and starting over (which you may wish to do if you have a second drobo to back up all the data on?)

3

Thanks for the response.

Yes, I sat thinking about the process I went through when I first bought Drobo. It’s going back a few years now and tbh I’ve never thought about it much. I did have ONE drive and one volume and then added them one by one.

It’s been trouble free apart from doing relayouts whenever I moved house, and sometime the vibration on the casing is a PITA.

Just moved some data off and formatted my second Drobo. Created one 8TB volume and am now in process of copying stuff back.

Any other best practices to share - backup etc?

4

hi magician,
for the vibration, you could try putting some mini cork/drink mats underneath each of the rubber feet.

i did that and once i adjusted the position of my drobo’s the vibration went away.
some people put something heavy on top of the unit but try the extra cork etc and see if it makes a difference[hr]
(if it doesnt, then you might have to use some “magic”) :smiley:

5

Best practices: UPS on the attached computer. Configure the attached computer to automatically shut down leaving the UPS with enough battery to run Drobo for a few minutes after the computer is shut down.

By allowing the attached computer to shut down properly in the event of utility power loss, we avoid filesystem corruption that can occur from a sudden loss of power.
Giving Drobo a little extra time after the computer shuts down helps ensure it can finish any pending operations and go to an “idle” state. It might still be doing internal housekeeping, but those should be much safer than any actual filesystem-level data changes.