Format / Re-initialize diskpack

Drobo - End of Sale Drobo 5N
1

So…at work, we had a FS, but because of the really slow speed of deleting multi-GB files from ext3 filesystems (an ext3 problem, not a FS problem), we bought a 5N, which, since it uses ext4, should not have this problem.

I want to take the 5 discs from the FS, and get a new ext4 filesystem on it from the 5N.

My first naive attempt was to delete the first 4.7MB of data from all 5 disks, with
dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/sda bs=512 count=9182

The drobo design was too clever for this, as when I inserted the disks and booted the 5N, I got a happy 5N with all the data and shares intact.

Currently, I am zeroing the entire 2TB on two of the disks, which should hopefully mess it up enough to re-initialize the whole thing. I estimate this will take about 15 hours per disk.

Does anybody (Drobo employees, etc) know how to do this faster? Just zero whatever part of the disk tells the drobo that this is part of a disk pack?

I really don’t want to do 5 of this, taking 75 hours total…even 2 at a time it will take the better part of 2 days…

Perhaps there is a super secret panel in the drobo dashboard - “Reset to factory defaults”? Would be handy if you ever wanted to sell one of these…

Richard

2

or just search the knowledge base for the word “reset” ?

http://support.drobo.com/app/answers/detail/a_id/32/kw/reset

3

Thanks…searched the forums for a number of terms, but didn’t look at the knowledge base at all!

Hopefully, the reset re-formats the diskpack, as I really want the ext4 filesystem.

4

Heh, technically you won’t be able to see the difference, as the ext4 driver is ext3 backwards compatible. If fact, if you look at a migrated diskpack (like mine) this is what Linux reports:

# cat /proc/mounts 
[...snipped...]
/dev/sda1 /mnt/DroboFS ext4 rw,noatime,nodiratime,barrier=1,data=ordered,discard 0 0

See how /dev/sda1 is mounted as ext4?

There should be some differences if you look deep down in the ext4 metadata, and if you are willing to help out I would love to find out.

Full disclosure: I don’t think that there is much difference between a native 5N diskpack and a migrated FS diskpack, but I have never had the opportunity to examine a native diskpack. In other words, I’m skeptical of the claim that a native diskpack is much faster than a migrated one.

5

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