I have a Drobo Pro.
It used to have eight 2 TB drives and was setup as a 16 TB volume.
I have now exchanged those drives with eight 6 TB drives.
Can I increase the size of the original volume?
I see a button in Drobo Dashboard to Add or Remove or Rename a volume, but nothing indicating I can increase the size of the existing volume.
What options do I have to make use of the additional capacity I have added?
Is there any way that I can end up with a single volume and not lose the data I have?
I cannot confirm, but I don’t think the storage pool of the Drobo Pro (being a legacy product) has been increased to any size larger than 16 TB…
You may still create multiple 16 TB volumes but you can’t utilize the extra space despite adding more 6 TB drives once that 16 TB threshold had been exceeded.
BeyondRAID (in any Drobo) does not support a single volume >16TB.
Yes you are correct, aside from the Drobo B1200i which supports volume size as large as 64 TB after its recent firmware update.
This is a new release of Drobo firmware for Drobo B1200i.
• Increased the capacity of the storage pool from 32TB to 128TB.
• Users can now create volumes as large as 64TB on current supported platforms.
• Added support for higher drive capacities (e.g. 6TB).
• Improved relayouts to be up to 8x faster.
• Improved collection of Diagnostic files under heavy loads.
• Fixed a crash caused when BitLocker or SyncToy were used.
• General stability and speed improvements.
• Better handling of bad disks
You could read up more from the release notes.
http://files.drobo.com/webrelease/b1200i/Release-Notes-firmware-1200i-1.2.0.pdf
KelvinY,
That would be huge news. Is there some documentation that shows a >16TB volume available? Perhaps Drobo is getting ready to ‘trickle down’ some of the 1200i’s feature set.
Because the PRO is a legacy, end of life product, we will not be releasing any new firmware for the unit. Kelvin is correct, we did just release firmware for the B1200i that can support 64 TB volumes with storage pools up to 128 TB. Also remember the volume limitations are based on the file system.
http://support.drobo.com/app/answers/detail/a_id/23
Below is a link to the B1200i’s recent firmware release notes.
http://files.drobo.com/webrelease/b1200i/Release-Notes-firmware-1200i-1.2.0.pdf
Drobo Support
Will the 64TB volume support be coming to the B800i or B800fs?
I have a DroboPro and the 16TB volume size limit has been a pain for a few years now. It’s even worse now that 8TB drives are commercially available. Going to a much more expensive 12 bay product like the b1200i is overkill for my needs
Regarding your comment about volume limitations:
HFS+ has supported 8 Exabyte volumes since May 28, 2008 with the release of OS X 10.5.3. That was over 6 years ago.
NTFS has supported up to 256 Terabyte volumes since Windows XP (2^32 allocation units @ 64KB).
I love my Drobos (I have 5) but having a 16TB volume limit for so long is inexcusable in my opinion.