Hi - forgive me if this has been answered somewhere else, but I’m planning on switching from a Windows 7 PC to an iMac. I’m currently connected to the PC via iSCSI, but I’m planning on connecting with Firewire 800 to the iMac.
I noticed when I upgraded the DroboPro firmware today that there are two versions of the firmware - for Mac and for PC. So, my question is what process/steps I should follow to successfully move the DroboPro from the PC to the Mac?
Do I need to update the firmware to the Mac Version first? Any other considerations?
the firmware are identical - they are just formatted/zipped differently so they can be opened by mac or pc - once they are on the drobo they are the same
the move is the same as any other external drive - windows machines read NTFS drives, macs prefer HFS
i think macs can read but not write to NTFS formatted volumes.
ideally you woudl wipe drobopro and formt it as HFS
i THINK (since you have the pro) - you can connect it to your mac - which can read your NTFS volume - and hten make a new HFS volume on your drobopro… .then copy everything from your NTFS volume to your HFS volume - then delete the NTFS volume.
do all of this in drobodashbaord and you should be fine
Thanks for the very fast reply! The copying thing won’t work as I have too much data on the Pro to copy it - not enough capacity. I did a little research and it appears that Snow Leopard is capable of writing to NTFS drives, but it’s not enabled by default (or officially supported, I assume). There are utilities available online to enable it, but I’d love to hear from other Drobo users who have figured that out!
I’m not sure i would trust it to - especially on a drobo
it wll be a HUGE nuisance - but you COULD… pull a drive out of your drobo - move some data onto that and then let drobo rebuild down to safe on the remaining drives.
then pull out another drive… move data onto that - then let drobo rebuild down AGAIN
repeat until all of your drives are out.
re-initialise drobo with the new file system
copy data back on - add that disk, copy more data, add that disk, until all your data is back on
of course yoru data would be “at risk” while doing this, but not to bad.
Wow - I understand the suggestion but that’s a BIG undertaking and there’s 9TB of data! Thanks for the suggestion. I’m sure it would be popular with Data Robotics, but I could also purchase another Drobo, format it for the Mac and then copy everything over from one Drobo to the other. I’m currently configured with two-drive protection on the Pro, so I COULD remove one drive at a time and do the copy that way, I suppose…
Wow - I understand the suggestion but that’s a BIG undertaking and there’s 9TB of data! Thanks for the suggestion. I’m sure it would be popular with Data Robotics, but I could also purchase another Drobo, format it for the Mac and then copy everything over from one Drobo to the other. I’m currently configured with two-drive protection on the Pro, so I COULD remove one drive at a time and do the copy that way, I suppose…
I’m not sure if I would use it as a full-time solution though, it didn’t seem like it was 100% solid.
I think a modification of DocChris’s solution of creating a new volume on your DroboPro and moving your data into it is probably the safest. You could use NTFS-3G to access the NTFS volume, read the files, write them to the new HFS+ volume, then delete them from the NTFS volume. You could even checksum them before and after to make sure the copy went through correctly before deleting. If you move the files like this the total amount of data on your Drobo won’t change, it will just get split between the two volumes. As long as the total in both volumes is less than the capacity of your Drobo then it will be OK.
I had a thought that might allow me to use Docchris’ approach. Right now, I have 8 2Tb drives in my DroboPro, with dual disk redundancy. It appears that my latest Firmware, 1.2.1, allows for the new 3Tb drives. I could effectively add significant capacity to the Drobo by replacing (one by one, of course), my 2 TB drives with 3Tb drives. That would add 8 Tb of capacity, enough to create a sufficiently large space for an HFS volume that could hold my NTFS files. I could copy them over on the Mac (which can read NTFS) and then delete the NTFS volume.
Can anyone think of issues or problems with that approach? Has anyone used 3Tb drives in a Drobo yet?
There’s another possibility, also. I’m planning on running Parallels on my new iMac for the occasional Windows program. Would I be able to read and write to the NTFS-formatted Drobo Pro through Parallels? If I did that, I supposed I’d manage the DroboPro through Dashboard on Windows/Parallels.