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Dear Diary...
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Doc HM
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Join Date: Oct 2008
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Jun 18, 2020, 10:25 AM
 
... today I am mostly watching multiple blue lines crawl across a screen.

A client presented me with a problem. Their quite old Drobo 5N is full, by which I mean hit the original 16TB volume limit. Thankfully and entirely uncharacteristically Drobo have updated their firmware to allow volume sizes to be expanded up to 64TB. Hooray. But only by erasing and resetting the RAID volume. Booo! So cue move 16TTB of data from one Drobo to another. Turns out this is a fairly slow process even using thunderbolt and connecting the 5N directly to the MacPro's ethernet port. Followed by a quick reset erase and then copying 16TB back to the original Drobo.
A quick check online shows that you cant just sling the disk pack from a 5D into a 5N (the Drobo I borrowed to do this) so I force much file moving in my near future.


That is all.
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Waragainstsleep
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Jun 18, 2020, 07:04 PM
 
I never got on with Drobos. We sold about 5 of the original style ones and to my knowledge every last one of them suffered multiple catastrophic disk failure and total data loss.
I have plenty of more important things to do, if only I could bring myself to do them....
     
Doc HM  (op)
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Jun 19, 2020, 07:22 AM
 
Originally Posted by Waragainstsleep View Post
I never got on with Drobos. We sold about 5 of the original style ones and to my knowledge every last one of them suffered multiple catastrophic disk failure and total data loss.
I can't say I have had that experience. This one has been fine(ish). The original machine died after about 5 years so the client bought a replacement on Ebay and swapped the disk pack over and it just read the data, which was nice. Having to reset the volume to expand over 16tb is a pain but most other RAID storage needs to be rebuilt just to expand so there's that.
I wouldn't have all my data only on any one Drobo for sure but that's just common sense. Its easy enough to have a second storage location and rsync the data.

It would have helped if a Drobo N could read Drobo D disk packs but for some reason you can only migrate direct storage to direct storage and NAS to NAS disk packs. If anyone on here can explain likely why that would be interesting. I would have thought that the actual disks themselves would not have cared what sort of enclosure they were in?
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reader50
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Jun 19, 2020, 12:42 PM
 
Originally Posted by Doc HM View Post
It would have helped if a Drobo N could read Drobo D disk packs but for some reason you can only migrate direct storage to direct storage and NAS to NAS disk packs. If anyone on here can explain likely why that would be interesting. I would have thought that the actual disks themselves would not have cared what sort of enclosure they were in?
I've never owned a Drobo, but other NAS companies have some of that. Synology or QNAP list which models are intercompatible, where you can swap drives. Though you usually have to keep the drives in order.

Drobo may have changed the mapping of virtual drive blocks to physical. This shouldn't matter (the RAID driver should accommodate variations) but NAS boxes seem to use simplified drivers. They also use the drive space for app storage. All those apps you download, for DVR security cameras, video playback, etc? Cheaper to store them on customer drives rather than include more flash storage. They may even store the OS on the customer drives. The built-in flash may only hold a basic OS, to format drives and download the latest OS.

So if Drobo changes the CPU from one model to the next, the customer apps (or even OS) could be incompatible. Again, it shouldn't matter - the firmware could recognize this, and download compatible OS and apps to replace those on the drives.
     
   
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