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Answers to your ten most frequently asked pre-sales questions.
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| Top 10 |
- How much space will I get when I put my hard drives into Drobo?
- What happens if my Drobo breaks? Can I put the hard drives in another Drobo?
- Can I take one drive out and archive it?
- Does Drobo appear as individual drives or one drive on my host computer?
- How should I configure my Drobo if I want to switch it between Windows XP, Windows Vista, or Mac OS X computers?
- Is 2TB the maximum volume size?
- How can I get optimal Windows FireWire performance on XP or Vista?
- Can I really use any hard drive I want?
- Can I connect Drobo via FireWire to my computer and have Drobo connected by USB to DroboShare simultaneously?
- Does DroboShare have a FireWire port?
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| Q: How much space will I get when I put my hard drives into Drobo? |
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A: Drobo is able to utilize different size hard drives in a very efficient way, however, some disk space must be reserved for keeping your data safe. As a rule of thumb, your free, protected capacity on Drobo is equivalent to the total sum of your hard drive capacity minus the size of the largest drive. A relatively small amount of capacity beyond that is also used by the file system you've chosen and Drobo. Please see the Drobolator storage calculator for more info. |
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| Q: What happens if my Drobo breaks? Can I put the hard drives in another Drobo? |
| A: Yes, in the unlikely event your Drobo breaks you can put your disk set in another Drobo! Drobo disk sets are swappable between Drobos. Data Robotics recommends having the same firmware on the destination Drobo as the original. |
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| Q: Can I take one drive out and archive it? |
| A: You can remove drives from Drobo and safely store them to archive them to be read back by Drobo at a later time. All you have to do is remove the disks out as a pack - this means if you have three drives in Drobo, you should remove and archive all three. If one of those three were to fail while in storage, your data would still be safe. You can only remove one drive and archive it if you started with just two. However, we do not recommend this as it is an inefficient use of disk capacity and removes the redundancy of the second disk. |
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| Q: Does Drobo appear as individual drives or one drive on my host computer? |
| A: We recommend formatting Drobo as one huge volume for simplicity's sake, but ultimately that's up to you. By default, Drobo Dashboard will create one huge volume. |
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| Q: How should I configure my Drobo if I want to switch it between Windows XP, Windows Vista, or Mac OS X computers? |
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A: If you want to switch back and forth between Macs and PCs (Windows and OS X), you've got a few options.
Option one is to format your Drobo using the FAT32 file system, which is read/write accessible by both operating systems. However, FAT32 has a number of limitations including maximum volume sizes of 2TB. Please also note that when you format or reformat a drive it erases ALL data on it.
Option two is to purchase software for either the Mac or PC that allows it to read/write the other's file system. For example, MediaFour's MacDrive allows a PC to read/write HFS+. Please be aware that this option relies on third-party software thus, certain limitations such as maximum volume size may apply to your operating system.
Option three is to share your Drobo on a network (just be sure to make sure you use a cross-platform networking protocol such as SMB/CIFS.) You can accomplish this either by using DroboShare or by using your operating system's built-in file sharing preferences located in the Control Panel or System Preferences. The downside to this approach is that drives shared over the network tend to have slower performance because of the inherent overhead associated with networking protocols. If you decide to share your data through your computer, your computer will always need to be on for shared files to become accessible. DroboShare takes the place of your computer so the computer doesn't always need to be on. DroboShare is the easiest to use or setup of all three options. |
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| Q: Is 2TB the maximum volume size? |
| A: No. You can format your Drobo's volume size as 1TB, 2TB, 4TB, 8TB or 16TB (even without having that much disk space.) This ability to format your volume larger than available disk space is called "thin provisioning." It allows you to grow into a single, large volume over time rather than needing multiple smaller volumes. |
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| Q: How can I get optimal Windows FireWire performance on XP or Vista? |
| A: To obtain optimum performance in Windows you need to utilize a third-party FireWire 800 driver, as neither Windows XP nor Vista has one pre-installed. If you do not use a third party driver, Windows XP SP2 will automatically treat any FireWire 800 device as if it were either a FireWire 100 or 400 device depending on whether you've applied the appropriate Microsoft Hotfix. Windows Vista will treat a FireWire800 device as if it were connected via FireWire 400. To get true FireWire 800 performance you'll need to use a third-party driver such as the quite popular one from Unibrain (make sure it's the latest version too). |
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| Q: Can I really use any hard drive I want? |
| A: Drobo is compatible with SATA I and SATA II 3.5" hard drives. If your drive meets those requirements and is fully functional, you should be OK. If your drive never worked correctly in the first place, it is unlikely Drobo will be able to revive it from the dead. |
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| Q: Can I connect Drobo via FireWire to my computer and have Drobo connected by USB to DroboShare simultaneously? |
| A: No. You may either direct attach your Drobo or network attach it via DroboShare and you can switch between the two, but you cannot use them simultaneously. |
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| Q: Does DroboShare have a FireWire port? |
| A: No. DroboShare utilizes a USB interface to connect to up two Drobos. |
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