Since John turned me onto the Drobo I have been a huge fan. I finally finished filling all 4 drive bays with 1TB drives a few weeks ago. Buying drives over the course of a few months defrayed the cost a bit. Last week I realized that if I want to have all 2.7TB of usable storage in one volume I will need to reformat the unit. Apparently the original firmware could only do up to 2TB volumes. Newer ones will do up to 16TB so I can add storage later and not have to worry about formatting the volume.
In order to reformat the Drobo I needed to move all the data currently on it off onto other storage while I performed the reconfiguration. The moving of the data off the Drobo took about 3 days. The reformatting of the unit took 15 minutes. While I was moving the data off the drive I realized that I would rather have that storage as NAS instead of directly connected to my Mac Mini desktop. When I was out earlier this morning I went over to J&R and picked up a DroboShare NAS attachment. The setup was just as easy as setting up the Drobo. I also like the fact that it piggy backs its power off of the Drobo.
Now that my Drobo is formatted for 8TB I can expand disks over the next few years without worrying about doing this exercise again. I am now copying all the data back onto the Drobo. It is slightly faster to do this by direct attaching the drive to my computer. Once I am done uploading the data, I will plug the drive back into the NAS head and my home network storage setup will be complete, for now. I want to see how long it takes me to use up 2.7TB?
The next big question is what to do with all my older external hard drives I have accumulated? I have many. I have about 5 250GB drives, and two 750GB external drives. It is allot, but I got the 750’s to replace some 250’s, and the 250’s never really went away. Once everything is on the Drobo I want to get rid of the 250’s and just have the two 750’s around for backups. And only a few years ago I thought it was allot to manage the data on one or two 18gb SCSI drives!