Here’s another bit of shared learning for my fellow Drobo users: Running out of space on my Drobo the other day, I decided to replace a 500GB drive with a 1TB drive (cheap at Fry’s, a Hitatchi 7200RPM 32MB Sata drive for less than $70, which reminded me how the service bureau I worked at while in graduate school paid over $2,000 for the first 1 Gigabyte drive (made by HP) to put in a Mac IIfx).
I brought up the Drobo instructions and popped the new drive in the bay of the one with the orange light. Happy flashing all orange then all green? Nope. All flashed RED for some time. I tried to put the old drive back in, but all still flashed red. I replaced the new drive and started looking for my notes about the last time my Drobo had a problem. I’d not noted the tech support phone number so I went to Drobo.com to find it and spent so much time looking, that the Drobo managed to adjust to the new drive and the red lights went away. Is that part of Drobo’s tec support plan? If so, it worked! Anyway, a new drive requires that the Drobo’s brain resort the mysterious parity scheme to offer its wonderful data protection. The Drobo dashboard informed me that this would take 78 hours.
Huh? I’d replaced the older drive mid-day Saturday, and it was supposed to finish up its internal bookkeeping Tuesday afternoon? I’m glad to say that it finally finished Monday afternoon, nicely ahead of schedule. But for a long time I was looking at a dashboard notice like the one above as it slowly counted down from 78. Progress was very erratic–sometimes I could see the progress bar move over a period of an hour, sometimes it would not move at for a couple of hours. Thinking it might have crashed and sit there indefinitely, I restarted the computer, which seemed to have no effect. The Drobo just had to do its thing at its own pace.
It managed in the end and is back in business, so I’m happy to have my data protected. But I got to thinking again about my choice to format the Drobo for 16TB when I first set it up. I did this because I’d heard on a popular photography podcast that one should do this since the Drobo can swap drives to increase capacity. Formatting for the max would allow me to expand up to 4 4TB drives without ever having to copy data to another source, reformat the Drobo, then copy data back. This sounds great, but my suspicion is that the 16TB format has something to do with the speed of my Drobo and the fact that replacing a drive takes several days to recover.
I wish I knew for a fact, but I expect from talking to friends with Drobos who say they use them as primary data sources for Lightroom and Aperture that having formatted theirs for 4TB makes a big difference in performance. With 2.24TB of 16TB active, my Drobo is not a viable partner for Lightroom. Loading a page of previews takes 7 or 8 seconds, and when you’re scrolling through 200 or 300 pages of previews… So I use a fast scratch disk that backs up to the Drobo and it works fine until I have to write 30 or 40 (or more) gigabytes to or from the Drobo. Then it’s a matter of workflow shutting down for some time.
So I’m thinking of moving to a 2GB work disk and using it to store the Drobo’s data while I reformat it to something smaller than 16TB, perhaps 6 for use 4 1.5TB disks. When I fill that Drobo up it will be time for a new one anyway, right? I’m still very positive about the Drobo as a secure local back up that protects against sudden hardware failure. Combined with my online back up, I feel pretty good about being able to recover from some catastrophe. I just wish the Drobo were faster. What’s the say? You can never be too rich, too good looking, or have storage that’s too fast?
