Which drive to replace?

Forum History Drobo
1

Hi,

I have a Drobo containing, from top to bottom,: 500GB, 500GB, 500GB, 1TB.

  • The three 500GB drives came from dismantled Western Digital My Book enclosures.

  • The 1TB drive came from dismantling some kind of Maxtor external enclosure.

So my question is this: which of the three 500GB drives do I replace. Is there any way of telling which is the oldest/noisiest/most likely to fail? My main concern at the moment is increasing capacity and reducing the noise, as my Drobo has been blowing like a hair-dryer in the recent warm weather.

Finally, could someone try to estimate how long the rebuild process will take when replacing one of the 500GB drives with a 2TB drive? My Drobo currently has 726.78GB of Used Space and 639.88GB of Free Space.

Thanks in advance,

Steve.

2

there is no way to tell those things while the drive sare in drobo.

you could turn drobo off, pull out the 500gb drives and use a pc or mac to query their SMART information to find out their total number of power on hours to figure out which is oldest/most used. but frankly its hardly worth it.

i’d just pull a random one

i would guess 12-18 hours for your rebuild (it will be significantly longer if you continue to use drobo while it is rebuilding

3

Thanks for the very quick reply. Just one more question…

I know this has been discussed endlessly on these boards, but I’d value your opinion - given that I can quite easily not use my computer for the 24 hours a rebuild might take, is it best to replace the drive with my computer (iMac) on or off?

Thanks,

Steve.

4

For fastest rebuild time, unmount Drobo and disconnect it from your computer. That will ensure no other access will slow down the rebuild/relayout.