Drobo Post Still Getting Hits
Posted January 18th, 2011 @ 02:46pm by Erik J. Barzeski
It's interesting to me that this Drobo post from late 2008 is still getting hits. But, then again, the information is pretty good and still relevant, so in that regard not surprising at all.
The point of this post? Just to point that out and to say that my Drobo continues to hum along just fine and dandy, and that I'm considering replacing the four drives in it now (500 GB drives) with some 2 TB Western Digital green drives - $99 before rebate and $79 after seems like a good deal.
Then again, there's no pressing need, and the longer you wait the cheaper storage gets…
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Posted 27 Jan 2011 at 1:43am #
If you do the upgrade to 2TB drives, don't do a drobo rebuild for them by replacing them one at a time. Make a back-up of your drobo. Then pull all four drives at once and put the new ones in. You then have to format and reset the drobo. Naturally end it by copying your data back on.
Normally, you can just replace the drives one at a time, but going to the 2 TB drives are a special case since they're "advanced format" and have the large sectors. The drobo doesn't switch over to the advanced format on the fly when you add new drives, it has to be reset to do it.
Replacing the drives keeps the old format and will work, but I'd recommend against it. I learned the hard way on this one not knowing any better. After the upgrade, my performance was dismal. Read/writes were in the 10-15 MB/s range. When I looked into it, I found this tip in the drobo forums. After reformatting mine I'm getting writes in the 20-25 MB/s range and reads in the 30-35 MB/s range which is the expected values for my set-up. It made a huge difference.
Posted 05 Feb 2011 at 3:23am #
I'd suggest against the WD 2TB green drives, we've had a very high failure rate with them (including some stupidly high DOA failure rates initially).
I'd highly recommend the Seagate Barracudas, they've been MUCH more reliable for us.
Same price btw,
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16822148413