When I first set up my drobo with 2x 1TB drives I was under the impression that I only needed to set up a partition the size of the drives I wanted to install, not the maximum I would ever want.
One year later (now) I have run out of space. I purchased 2 more drives (total of 4x 1TB drives) and I’ve only got a single 2TB partition, and the remaining space is un partitioned space that I can’t do anything with yet.
Is it possible to resize the partition on the drobo to use the full 4TB of drives I’ve put in there now?
Jennifer, I am new to Drobo and have been reading around the forums for answers.
How does your post answer the question? It doesn’t.
If the OP configured the Drobo as 2TB, then how do you expand it to 4TB in the existing Drobo? He has added the additional drives?
Gotta kill the existing setup and reformat the Drobo with the new drives as a 4TB, then copy over all the data( that temporarily was saved over somewhere else)?
I do not think that DRI makes that clear at the outset, and sorry, but didn’t find your answer any more helpful than the little booklet the Drobo came with.
If your partition is formatted to a 2TB volume size in order to change that size you need to migrate the data off your drobo and reformat for a larger volume size.
chrisbarr had mentioned he formatted to a 2TB volume size and had increased his available data size but was unable to use the new space.
Then bytec said repartitioning was not possible but could partition the new space to use it.
I didn’t “answer” the post because Bytec did.
I was just adding that dashboard should have prompted to format a new volume when he added his drives and increased his available data size.
Jennifer,
I appreciate your reply and am not trying to get off on the wrong foot with you.
So, listen. I chose the DROBO 'cause I think it is a really good product. But, the available literature from DROBO leaves a few gaps(maybe alot) that users should know.
Let’s suppose this is the only thread about how to upsize a partition on the Drobo.
Bytec is the first responddent and did not ANSWER the question.
Starting with “AFAIK” is disclaimer for “Maybe”.
I must be mistaken to have assumed your posts in thread would be directed toward the question/situation posed. I kind of thought that with your position or title that you are a semi-spokesperson for DRI.
For clarity, you posted in response to bytec? I didn’t read it that way.
My mistake.
Sorry for the interruption.
Just in case someone is using this as a reference:
If you add sufficient disks that your avalaible space exceeds the size of your first drobo logical volume, then you end up with unformatted space.
You have two choices:
Unload your drobo to somewhere else, reformat it as a larger disk, then reload it.
Format the space that you cannot use as an additional partition.
Incidentally, I learned all the above by perusing the drobo online documentation. And there is nothing new (to this thread) in what I said.
I’m hoping that by the time I reach the 2GB size that I have, someone will have figured out a way to increase the size of the drobo logical drive, in the same way you can increase the partition size on a RAID array after you’ve replaced all the disks with larger ones (I did this often, with Partition Magic)
It’s not that I’m unable to use the space of the drives I just added, i can format it however I wish. I was just hoping not to have multiple partitions on my Drobo.
If I had another very large drive where I could dump all my data to temporarily I would do it so I could properly format my Drobo now that I understand you how it works.
For as simple as the Drobo makes everything else, it’s a shame that the user almost needs to know what it’s doing behind the scenes when it lies to your computer about having more disk space then it currently actually has.
Oh well, I suppose I’ll just have to have two partitions. One for Time Machine and the other for other data.