drobo disk question

I'm not sure this is the right place for this but....

Used and free space on your drives won't affect how hot they run. The drives get hot when they're spinning, when you're reading or writing to them. Storage devices spend a lot of time at idle so the fans shouldn't need to be very active the majority of the time.

To erase the drives you will need to put them in another machine, or an external enclosure and format them. You can use an OS install dvd or Disk Utility. If you have any sensitive data you will want to use a program made for destroying data to more thoroughly erase the data.

Are you planning on selling them?
You can get ide/sata to usb adapters on Newegg for about $25.

Once you swap out those drives get this $30 adaptor kit and basically use your 500 gb as USB drives without having to buy an enclosure.

The way a drobo works the data files are spread out all over the place anyway, spanned between disks, such that the disks would most likely not be readable once you remove them anyway. I am sure that some low-level diagnostic utilities may be able to find some useful data on the disks, but to the average user the data would look like gibberish. It would be interesting to pull a disk from the drobo and look at its contents, but I don't think you will be able to make any use of it.

jessica. said:

Once you swap out those drives get this $30 adaptor kit and basically use your 500 gb as USB drives without having to buy an enclosure.

Click to expand...

That looks like a very useful little gadget there!

The Newer Technology Universal Adapters are amazingly awesome and versatile, all our techs are equipped with them at my organization (with the fancy bag OWC sells for them).

If you want to keep using the 500's you can probably get an external enclosure for not much more than the adapter. Those adapters are useful though.