Drobo Repurposed
Posted December 1st, 2008 @ 12:25pm by Erik J. Barzeski
Given this problem and the many others I've had with my Drobo ((This includes its complete and utter failure to work as a Time Machine backup - I think my attempts to resize the sparsebundle resulted in failure. I could mount the disk, browse the files, and copy any I wanted to, but Time Machine showed no backups at all.)), about a week ago I shuffled things around in order to better accommodate the functionality of the Drobo and my system needs.
So currently, my drive situation looks like this:
- 1 TB Internal Drive "Peter" - main boot volume, Mac OS X 10.5.5, etc. [275 GB]
- 1 TB Internal Drive "Roger" - psync nightly cloned version of Peter, bootable. [275 GB (duh)]
- 1 TB Internal Drive "Harvey" contains only three things: Aperture Library, iPhoto Library, Windows XP.pvm file for Parallels. [160 GB]
- 1 TB Internal Drive "Mimzy" - new Time Machine drive. Currently 457 GB used with 450 GB or so free.
- Drobo with four 500 GB drives (1.3 TB actual space) "Thumper" - partitioned to 16 TB for future-proofing. Contains "Videos" folder (home movies, TV series, DVD rips) and my Aperture Vault (backup).
For obvious reasons, "Roger" isn't copied to the Time Machine volume "Mimzy."
In the end, this arrangement both takes advantage of the Drobo while once again providing me with worry-free Time Machine backups. The only thing I'm not backing up is the 500 GB of data or so on the Drobo, and ideally that data should be pretty safe unless two drives fail at the same exact time or something.
Donate Life
Posted 02 Dec 2008 at 3:58pm #
Are you doing anything for an off-site backup? If you have a disaster at home (robbery, house fire, etc), having an off-site backup is one less thing to worry about.
Posted 02 Dec 2008 at 7:42pm #
I have a question regarding your drobo experience.
I've been looking into getting one, but people have been telling me its a sham.
Have you ever had a drive fail? (how did it respond to that, if yes)
And which of the following would you recommend:
1) Drobo
2) Small (mini-ITX) computer running FreeNAS and RAID 5
Posted 02 Dec 2008 at 9:51pm #
[quote comment="51153"]Have you ever had a drive fail? (how did it respond to that, if yes)[/quote]
I have not. And I don't know that I can answer your second question.
Posted 02 Dec 2008 at 10:16pm #
[quote comment="51153"]And which of the following would you recommend:
1) Drobo
2) Small (mini-ITX) computer running FreeNAS and RAID 5[/quote]
I have been excessively happy with the ReadyNAS NV. I haven't had a drive fail, but putting in a new one to automatically increase the size of the RAID set was dead simple.
Posted 02 Dec 2008 at 10:18pm #
[quote comment="51154"][quote comment="51153"]Have you ever had a drive fail? (how did it respond to that, if yes)[/quote]
I have not. And I don't know that I can answer your second question.[/quote]
Alright, thanks though.
[quote comment="51155"][quote comment="51153"]And which of the following would you recommend:
1) Drobo
2) Small (mini-ITX) computer running FreeNAS and RAID 5[/quote]
I have been excessively happy with the ReadyNAS NV. I haven't had a drive fail, but putting in a new one to automatically increase the size of the RAID set was dead simple.[/quote]
My problem is i need something not so pricy. the readyNAS are EXPENSIVE.
a mini itx box will be cheapest. I can build a box for less than 300$, that can take 3 drives in raid 5.
Posted 24 Dec 2008 at 9:06am #
[...] Dec. 24, 2008: I've long since repurposed my Drobo after running into the same problem a commenter below had: the data backs up but doesn't show [...]
Posted 16 Dec 2013 at 4:27am #
I have written a guide for fixing "Drobo Detected an Internal Error" errors if anyone encounters this:
http://www.techremedy.co.nz/misc/drobo-detected-an-internal-error/