How Much Will My Drobo REALLY Store?

Forum History General Discussion
1

I have a vanilla Drobo with 4x2TB drives, set up in a 16TB partition. (I’m just waiting for the price of 4TB drives to come down!)

Drobo Dashboard tells me that gives me about 5.42TB of useable space. Which is great, because that’s about how much I need.

There’s just one problem.

When I get down to about 1TB of “free” space, Drobo turns one of my warning lights red and tells me I have to put in a bigger hard drive.

So do my 4x2TB hard drives give me 5.42TB of real storage, or just 4.42TB?

I"m fine either way, I’d just like to know if something is wrong.

2

You can fill the drobo up to 100%. BeyondRAID is designed to progressively slow the drobo down as the volume approaches full.

3

Slowing down isn’t a problem – I only use mine for storing (a rather large) iTunes library. So it doesn’t see a whole lot of read/write action.

Thanks for your help!

4

hi vodka :slight_smile: this page might help too:
http://www.drobo.com/products/capacity-calculator/

5

You’ll notice.

http://support.drobo.com/app/answers/detail/a_id/200/kw/slow

6

[quote=“mgriffin34, post:5, topic:11253”]
You’ll notice.[/quote]

Indeed! LOL

Drobo gives you some advance notice that it’s getting full, so you have time to buy another hard drive or something. It’s not really an error condition.