I recently moved from a Power Mac G5 to a Mac Pro and in general it has been a smooth transition. One frustration recently however has been using it with my Drobo.
I had two 1.5TB drives in my Drobo with some data. I connected it using FW800 as usual and created a sparse image for my Time machine drive. The Drobo was soon getting full so I added another 1.5TB disk. At first I couldn't get this to be recognised in either bay 3 or 4 - it span up but the green light never came on. I tested the drive in a separate enclosure and found it worked fine. As a last resort I unplugged the Drobo from the power and when it started up the drive was recognised!
The only problem now is I sleep my Mac Pro when not in use and although the Drobo will sleep fine whenever I wake my Mac the drives in the Drobo spin up - the green lights come on and then all the lights go out and it reboots itself. OS X then gives the device removal message as if I had pulled a cable.
I had seen this once or twice on my G5 but figured out it was when the Drobo hadn't been accessed and the drives were spun down - when putting the G5 to sleep the Drobo would start spinning up the drives just as the computer went to sleep. I got around this problem by making sure I accessed the Drobo before choosing sleep so the drives were spinning.
I have a Drobo for data backup and storage. Anyway I am looking to connect the Drobo to my Airport Express as an AirDisk. However the Drobo keeps going into 'sleep' mode and I can't access it anymore.
Has anyone had any luck with not using an Internal Hard Drive and using either a Drobo or external drive to run OSX? I was thinking of getting a new HD that runs FW800 or using my Drobo to creat a partition to load Mac OSX on and run the OS from an external HD.
The Reason I am even trying this, is because the Mini uses Laptop drives with less specs then my External Seagate 500GB 7200RPM with 16 MB of Cache, also 3.5" drives seem to run quicker then even the fastest 2.5" drives.
First I thought on buying the 4 bay one, but then I found its 2nd generation, so I guess it would be better to buy the newest one, which would be the 5 bay, not the FS one. I've never used a NAS, so I dont know how it works.
Now I'm looking at the Drobo with 8 bay, and I really like it. With that one I wouldnt have storage problems for years, and I download many many things every day: tv shows, movies,, pictures, music, etc
I have used my first generation USB Drobo for a few years with relative success with my G5. I've now upgraded to a Mac Pro with OSX 10.6.4. I have 3 volumes on my desktop drobo 1 is for time machine, drobo 2 and 3 are backup files. I have 7.5 TBs total. Ever since the computer upgrade the Drobo (all 3 volumes) unmount and the warning window opens saying a devise was disconnected improperly. I called Drobo, they say run disc utility to repair any time that happens. So I run repair , 2 and 3 volume repair quickly, Volume 1 can take 16 or 20 hours.
I have went over this many times with Drobo, I ran a diagnostic test and sent to them, they say my drives are fine, they sent me a new power adaptor. I took Drobo home to my G5 and it ran fine for a week, I take it to work and attach it to the Mac Pro and poof, disconnects in less than an hour. Drobo wants me to reformat the machine now (I do have everything backed up on G Techs). Should I bother erasing and starting over with this or use it as an $800 paperweight?
I will be shopping for an ethernet-based NAS for my new house in a few months. While I have some knowledge of the Drobo, I was wondering how a Drobo compared to a Synology or comparable brand NAS.
I am looking to use this primarily for Time Machine backups and iTunes storage.
I want to upgrade my current NAS (Synology 109j) to something that is expandable and redundant. Last weekend I thought a Drobo with DroboShare would be great! Then I remembered that HP makes a MediaSmart server that runs Windows HomeServer [URL]. Now I'm stuck. I'm not sure which one I should get. What are your thoughts?
With a Mac Mini as a HTPC, I am going to add external storage that can be expanded to about 8TB. I don't see myself maxing out 4TB in the near future.
I have looked into Drobo, despite all of the mixed reviews. Some say they love it, some say it is slow and have had problems, and some have said their Drobo died no more than a year in. However, the ease of use and ease of expandability is very tempting. So, if I do not find an alternative I will purchase a Drobo soon.
I don't have experience with setting up RAIDs though I've read a lot and don't think it would be too difficult. The Drobo doesn't do eSATA and I really want the fastest possible so OWC Mercury Elite beats it there. Still I've fallen victim to the Drobo gimmick where it seems really easy, does it all for you, but most importantly you can use any size drive and the Drobo does the dirty work. I'm not even sure what this "dirty" work would involve since I always thought when building an array you needed to have drives that are identical in model/make and size. Am I wrong? Can a cheaper OWC Mercury Elite like this be as user friendly as the Drobo? Are there other recommendations?
Barefeats recently reviewed the OWC Mercury Elite here but it doesn't compare it to other setups. In fact it say's in the article it won't provide blazing speeds without dedicated eSATA channels which isn't exactly a positive review. Still it would be faster than a Drobo. Am I missing any other options for the same price or less?
Im planning on getting a Drobo S. However, Im torn between getting 5 - 2TB 5400 drives or 5 - 1TB 7200 drives. I plan on using it strictly for data storage and as a capture scratch.
I'll be using it via ESATA but was wondering if I would notice a significant difference between the 5400 and the 7200 and if that difference is worth the loss of space?
Anyone have any idea what drives would be best for use in Drobo S?
Does anyone know if partitioning a Drobo is "necessary" if you're planning on using your Drobo as your Time Machine Volume. I called Data Robotics about this and they weren't even able to give me a straight answer. They did tell me that Apple recommends partitioning the Drobo if you're planning on using it as your Time Machine volume, but they weren't sure why this was recommended (strange that they wouldn't know, if you ask me).
Here is my current situation: I recently purchased a Drobo (4-Bay; Firewire 800) and I plan on filling the Drobo with 4 1TB drives and using it exclusively for Time Machine backups. I have no need whatsoever for storing any additional data on my Drobo other than the data backed up by Time Machine (which would be one reason why someone might want to partition the Drobo... but this is not the case for me).
Here's the thing that makes me believe that it might be "necessary" to partition the Drobo. When I initially formatted the drives and setup my 4x 1TB drives as a single mounted volume (2.7TB of usable storage space), the Drobo Dashboard utility requires that you choose a specify a volume size by picking a size between 1-16TB, and they recommend choosing a volume size that will be large enough to store all of your files for the foreseeable future. See the image below (photo below was taken with my iPhone and uploaded to the web via the cool new DropBox app):
Seeing as how it's a 4-Bay Drive and thought I currently have 4 1TB drives in it, I can't imaging ever putting more than 4 2TB drives in it, and so I've specified a volume size of 8TB for my Drobo. Anyone who has ever used a Drobo knows that in the Finder, this volume is listed as having 8TB of usable storage space available, though in reality you actually have less than that (in my case as I stated earlier, my 4x 1TB drives provide for 2.7TB of usable storage space).
Perhaps the Drobo might need to be formatted so that once the Time Machine backups fill up the 2.7TB of space, that it doesn't inadvertently think that there are 8TB of space available and then it erroneously continues backing up (which would theoretically result in problems). This is just a theory as to why partitioning might be "necessary". Can anyone confirm or deny whether or not partitioning the Drobo volume is "required" if I plan on using the Drobo as my dedicated Time Machine volume?
I formatted my Drobo with NTFS and used to use Bootcamp. Now I got rid of Windows and only use my Mac running OSX 10.6. How do I transfer all my data from my Drobo and reformat to HFS? If I reformat to HFS I will lose all my data on the existing drives... I basically want to be able to access and write to the Drobo as I did with Windows before, with the data intact.
I originally formated my Drobo to 2TBs which I've now outgrown and need to reformat to avoid having two partitions. That requires that I xfer the data on a Drobo to another HD. Right now I have 1.2TB of data on the Drobo. I'm pretty a 1.5TB drive will be able to handle this, but not 100%. Will it once it's formatted? Next question: is migrating data from a Drobo to an ext. drive as easy as using Carbon Copy Cloner or Super Duper and cloning the Drobo and then using CCC/SD again to send the data back to the Drobo? Do these apps see the Drobo as one drive and Drobo does the rest, as it normally does?
Anyone have experience hooking up a Drobo to a Time Capsule or Airport Extreme and how it compares to the Drobo networking device? Don't really want to plunk down $200 for duplicate functionality.
My new 27" i7 is supposed to be delivered next week, got the SATA cables for installing my own SSD, but am a bit doubtful as to where placing my Scratch space. So, I will end up with an iMac with two internal drives (SSD + HDD).OS, System Library and Applications go to the internal SSD (120GB).
As I will be using FCS (besides CS package and other smaller programms) I would like to set up a dedicated Scratch drive for it.
Which of the following options would you go for, and why?:
1: install scratch space on the internal HDD together with all the other data (pics, music, videos - space is not the issue with a 2TB drive). Would a partition be advisable in this case, since I heard that partitioning slows a disc down considerably.
2: install scratch space on the internal HDD (scratch only), and all other files (pics/music/video) on an external FW800 HDD.
3: install scratch space on the external FW800 HDD (all other files on the internal HDD like usual).
4: use an external RAID backup as scratch space as well (something like the Drobo) with a FW800 connection.
I was looking for feedback on using the Drobo not only as a backup, but also as a scratch - some people found it great working, others not so much...I'd like to find out, if that has to do with the FW800 bottleneck, or if a Drobo scratch is even slower than an external FW800 HDD would be. I know that eSata would be faster, but that is currently out of reach (besides the OWC mod.).
Sometimes I like to eject the drobo from the mac pro, is there any to reconnect the drobo without reaching in the back to pull out and plug back in the firewire cable?
I currently have external storage devices by DataRobotics - 2 DroboPro and 1 DroboElite. I bought the new MacPro 2 months ago and have been having problems with the Drobo devices disconnecting constantly. After a lot of diagnostics including Apple replacing the logic board in my MacPro, it was identified that the issue was with the iSCSI initiator that DataRobotics uses. It is not 64bit kernal compatible and as a result, the drives disconnect randomly especially when moving data from one external drive to the other. I am forced to boot the MacPro in 32bit kernel mode for the drives to work properly. DataRobotics is not committing to fixing the 64bit kernel issue so I'm now looking to replace this technology.
I found some interesting technology by Netgear and was considering buying their product, however, I had the worst experience ever with dealing with pre-sales & technical support department, after dealing with 4 different individuals, I concluded that they have no clue about their own products, the staff is so junior, it's as if I called a completely different company when talking about their own product. I am therefore going to stay away from that company.
