Reclaiming "for protection" space

Drobo - End of Sale Drobo 5N
1

Hello. Just recently picked up a used, perfectly working 5N. I share the disappointment in lack of advanced options that other newcomers to Drobo seem to experience. But I’m going to give the system a try.

Specifically I’m not happy about the amount of space taken up “for protection”. Protection from what? Is this an auto-generated backup portion for the 20% of data that was most recently accessed? How do I get access to this space so I can use the maximum of capacity available?

As you can see I’ve mounted five 4-TB WD Green drives.

Any help or advice is much appreciated, since the documentation for the 5N is so sparse (I assume on purpose).

2

Hi, you need to look here:

http://www.drobo.com/storage-products/capacity-calculator/

Drobos automatically have redundancy for a single disk failure, with an option for dual disk redundancy. That comes with an overhead. It’s a core feature of the Drobo brand and can’t be turned off.