Hello,
I’m a first time Drobo owner, I currently have a Drobo 5D with three drives 2x 4TB and 1x 2TB. I’m looking to set it up in such a way that they three drives are all separate volumes. The two 4TB drives are mirrored and the 2TB is an editing scratch disk. Can anyone tell me how I can configure this?
Thank you.
That’s not possible with Drobo.
hi, like zbig said, you cant really do that at the physical drive level.
if you are on windows, you could set a volume limit of 2tb ntfs volumes, and the drobo will create 2tb volumes (virtually split across all the drives) and then you will end up with a drive letter per volume.
i have done that, and i effectively can mirror my main data folders on 1 volume, onto another volume on the same drobo (using another tool called SyncBack)
usually i have 2 (4-slot drobos), where 1 is a mirror of the other, by way of volume mirroring (minus hidden/system dirs etc)
but for my drobo-s, i only have one of those, so i do selective volume mirroring there, along with Dual Drive protection for extra peace of mind.
if you search for keywords like syncback on the forums it can show you more info about that etc…
in your case though, i think if you were to add another 2tb drive you would gain more usable space overall, as your largest capacity drive (4tb in this case), will be used up for SDR protection. (protection will be made up from all the drives, but it usually takes up the same amount of TB as your largest drive)
Copying data to the same physical drive (set of drives) on filesystem level is an utterly pointless exercise. If you want hardware redundancy, Drobo does it for you already - that’s why you bought it, right? If you want backup (and you definitely should!), offsite is the way to go. Making file copies within one physical box, apart from being hopeless operation (shuffling the same chunks of data from- and back to your drive through your PC), doesn’t provide you any real benefits. Drunk/careless data management? You could just as well nuke all of your volumes. Malware/viruses? See above. Why waste your time and disk space manually doing what Drobo is designed to do already, once again, only worse? It’s like photocopying all your handwritten notes and then rewriting them manually once again, only to bind them all together and spilling the coffee on all of them at once at the end of the day.
EDIT:
If you want version control (being able to revert previous files’ versions), that too, is not the way to go. Either use proper version control system or a backup solution which provides you such functionality.