q: clarification re Dashboard "running low on free space" Yellow Warning message

Forum History Drobo Dashboard
1

Hello, simply looking for clarification / confirmation wrt terminology appearing in a “Suggested Actions” message which Drobo Dashboard is displaying.

Currently have a temporary high-data-use situation which is throwing a slightly-confusing Yellow Warning message indicating an “empty data bay”.

Suggested Actions message: “Yellow Warning, Drobo is running low on free space. Insert a new hard drive into the empty data bay indicated by the yellow light.” (italics = my emphasis)

Question

Concerning the words “the empty data bay indicated by the yellow light”: yes, the DroboS is running low on free space; but the top-most hard drive bay - indicated as yellow - does indeed have a drive in it (one of 5x 2TB drives).

  • Is this a normal but poorly-worded message (ie pull out the indicated drive, replace with a larger one)?

  • Or is there some anomaly, and the message claiming that the drive bay is empty indicates that there is some problem?

Asking because, if I were to pull and replace only the one drive indicated yellow (or even two drives) with higher-capacity hard drives, the additional space will not yet add to “Available for Data” space; according to documentation I can find, and Drobo Capacity Calculator, it will simply add to “Reserved for Expansion.”

Info

Overview: am running numerous Drobo products (Drobo, DroboS, DroboPro), all of which must be accessible to older PPC-based apple products (ie PowerBook G4s) running OS 10.4.11 & 10.5.x, via firewire800. Hence versions of Dashboard, firmware are specifically-chosen.

Specific configuration for this question:
Drobo S
drives: 5x matched 2TB
formatted as 1x 16TB volume
Dual drive redundancy = yes
Drobo S firmware 2.1.2
Drobo Dashboard 1.8.4

Status: I realize that this DroboS is indeed running low on free space:
5.40 TB = Storage Capacity (aka “Available for Data”)
4.66 TB = Used Space
757.44 GB = Free Space

Drobo Dashboard is displaying Used Space (in the pie chart) as yellow.
Drobo Dashboard is displaying top-most HD (in Drobo Status) as yellow.
DroboS is showing top-most HD bay as yellow; all others green.

thank you

2

if you can see the drive in drobo dashboard then it knows its there

its just poorly worded (and it wasnt like that in the older versions of dashboard)

it should say replace the drive with a larger capacity one.

and yes if you did that - you would not get any more space, but then the yellow would move to the second bay

then if you replaced the second bay you still would not get more space, and the yellow would move to the third bay

if you replaced that then you would finally get your extra TB (assuming you were using 3TB drives)

3

thank you for the info!

4

no problem :smiley:

5

i like the way you structured your initial post - breaking it into questions and summaries etc :slight_smile:

btw on my dashboard 1.7.3, it shows my top slot in the 4-slot gen 1 (and identical 4 slot gen2) as solid red
(this is because both are quite full, 4% free) and drives are matched. but here the alert message/suggestion says to Replace it with a larger capacity drive.

(just to add to docChris above, your wording might be due to the dashboard youre using, but i guess if you need the compatibility of your current setups its understandable - i’ll have to do something similar soon too to get another drobo added to my setup - but i’ll save that for another post :slight_smile: