Hi has anyone used a drobo on a raspberry pi running xbmc to store all of there movies etc?
I’m worried about disconnecting it from the raspberry as it has no power switch. I’ve got 6tb of data I don’t want to lose/corrupt.
Any opinions? Cheers
you can eject/dismount drives surely?
otherwise you could run the same corruption risk with any hard disk plugged into the pi?
I’m not sure bud as I’m waiting for it to come in the post. Just trying to work things out before hand.
Will I need to unmount the drive before I run shutdown on the raspberry?
The answers to these questions really depend on what software you’re going to run, and how familiar you are with it.
You’ll get the most help if you choose to run Linux on your Raspberry Pi.
Linux and NetBSD have the ‘umount’ command, and Linux often also has an automounter with its own interface.
I have no knowledge of RiscOS, although I’m sure that also lets you mount and unmount filesystems.
Speaking of filesystems, do you plan to use extfs or NTFS on your Drobo?
I intend to run Openelec with xbmc and my drobo is in ntfs format.
The Drobo itself should have no problems. Also, un-mounting is part of normal OS shutdowns and doesn’t require an extra step.
This doesn’t answer how well OpenELEC handles NTFS volumes (of whatever size you have provisioned) and drives connected over USB (or whatever interface you chose).
According to some web searches and the documentation on openelec.tv, OpenELEC appears based on Linux, and there’s a package for ntfs-3g. You might get better information from OpenELEC users at this point. 
Nice one, thanks a lot for you’re help.
My suggestion to you is actually to get a second Pi and run plain Raspbian on that one. That way you can still have the Drobo available to other devices, and avoid any possibility of shutting down the Drobo by accident.
Bonus: you can use that second Pi to run all the background apps to download stuff without slowing down your XBMC Pi.
Bit then I’d have to stream my content rather than get it straight of the drobo. The raspberry pi is only a temporary media player to replace my dead boxee box until I’ve saved and build a proper htpc.
what happened to the boxee before btw?
Your Raspberry Pi will be fine with your Drobo. OpenElec should mount your Drobo without issue. You obviously won’t be able to run Dashboard as there isn’t an ARM port of the Drobo Dashboard.
Your Pi doesn’t have a power switch but, which shouldn’t be a problem as the power draw is tiny. A model B draws about 800mAh, a model A about a third of that. You should never need to turn your Pi off. If you do, OpenElec should do a safe shut down for you, but you will have to power cycle to turn it back on. If you wish there are two GPIO pins you can short to power cycle.
Have fun!
hi darkense, can you let us know which drobo you’ve been able to use with a raspberry?
i saw 2 in your sig and wasnt sure
I have used Raspberry Pis (model B 256MB, model B 512 and model A) with my two Drobos, but these are NASs, not DASs. I’ve never had a Drobo, Drobo S or 5D, however, I have also used other DASs fine with these Pis and come across no issues so I’m sure the Drobo S will work fine as long as the volumes etc have already been provisioned before connecting to the Pi (due to the no ARM port of the dashboard issue).
Pis can also have their root drive (though not boot partition) on either DASs or my Drobos (NASs) which is great for the Pi as the SD card random IOs can be a little slow sometimes.
I’m currently building a RPi streaming baby monitor using model As that dumps data to my 5N so I can review it later…
As I said - have fun!
ok thanks for the information
that project of yours sounds interesting[hr]
actually there might be something cool in that… live streaming to a sound file…
and an app to analyse sounds so it send you an email alert if you hear coughing or something