Some Drobo questions

[Magician717]

Hello all,

There was a thread a few years back called "Out of Control iTunes libraries" that was really fascinating to me. Started five years ago encoding all of my DVD collection to my Macs. Originally did 4.5gig full source encodes of all of my movies.

Used Plex and the XMBC for awhile but always seem to have picture position issues. iTunes just sort of worked for me - enabled me to share the collection wirelessly around the house and saved me a TON from buying a K-System to do the same thing.

Finally bit the bullet of re-encoding them all into iTunes late last year. Reckon I have spent more time messing around with the Mac and the metadata rather than watching it all!

Not much of a power user but hoping for some insight and best practice advice.

I use two Gen 1 Drobos connected to two Macs at home. Each have 4x2tB WD Green Caviar drives in them.

One is located in the TV room and basically holds my entire DVD collection.

The other is in my home office and is intended to be a backup of the other Drobo.

The drives in each are labelled as A,B and C.

What is the optimum way to use my Drobo's here?

Currently the iTunes library boots from Drive A. Drives B and C are barely used.

This drive is almost at capacity.

Should I split the data across all three drives evenly?

If so, how do I tell iTunes to look at all three drives?

My configuration means that three separate drives boot on my Desktop. Is this correct? Or should I just see the drive as one big drive?

I am pretty confused and am hoping someone here can give me some good advice.

Thanks!

Eric in London

 

[Nightarchaon]

Hello all,

There was a thread a few years back called "Out of Control iTunes libraries" that was really fascinating to me. Started five years ago encoding all of my DVD collection to my Macs. Originally did 4.5gig full source encodes of all of my movies.

Used Plex and the XMBC for awhile but always seem to have picture position issues. iTunes just sort of worked for me - enabled me to share the collection wirelessly around the house and saved me a TON from buying a K-System to do the same thing.

Finally bit the bullet of re-encoding them all into iTunes late last year. Reckon I have spent more time messing around with the Mac and the metadata rather than watching it all!

Not much of a power user but hoping for some insight and best practice advice.

I use two Gen 1 Drobos connected to two Macs at home. Each have 4x2tB WD Green Caviar drives in them.

One is located in the TV room and basically holds my entire DVD collection.

The other is in my home office and is intended to be a backup of the other Drobo.

The drives in each are labelled as A,B and C.

What is the optimum way to use my Drobo's here?

Currently the iTunes library boots from Drive A. Drives B and C are barely used.

This drive is almost at capacity.

Should I split the data across all three drives evenly?

If so, how do I tell iTunes to look at all three drives?

My configuration means that three separate drives boot on my Desktop. Is this correct? Or should I just see the drive as one big drive?

I am pretty confused and am hoping someone here can give me some good advice.

Thanks!

Eric in London

Sounds to me like your using the Drobo wrong. Backup your data and reformat the Drobo as a single drive , then copy the library back on, my Drobo has 4, 3TB WD drives on it as a single partition. And I'm looking at upgrading to 4TB drives soon as I'm down to less than 700GB already

When you initially set up the Drobo you probably set the "volume" size to 2TB , set it to 8TB or 16TB when you reformat and you will just see a single drive with all the space

 

[Attonine]

Agree with Nightarchaon.

You need to reformat the drobo to believe it's a 16TB drive. This will then show up as one drive on your desktop. This will also allow the ability to pop in a replacement drive, of any capacity, should just one HDD fail. You can also swap in a higher capacity drive when you need more capacity, to a maximum of 16TB (the maximum this drobo allows).

As you can see, this set-up allows a certain amount of security for drive failure. Your current setup, if I understand correctly, each individual drobo does not have any protection, the protection is from duplication across the 2 drobos. Keep the duplication as this will provide 100% security should 1 of the drobos fail catastrophically.

 

[KevinC867]

Agree with Nightarchaon.

You need to reformat the drobo to believe it's a 16TB drive. This will then show up as one drive on your desktop. This will also allow the ability to pop in a replacement drive, of any capacity, should just one HDD fail. You can also swap in a higher capacity drive when you need more capacity, to a maximum of 16TB (the maximum this drobo allows).

As you can see, this set-up allows a certain amount of security for drive failure. Your current setup, if I understand correctly, each individual drobo dies not have any protection, the protection is from duplication across the 2 drobos. Keep the duplication as this will provide 100% security should 1 of the drobos fail catastrophically.

It looks like a 4x2TB Drobo setup will give you 5.4TB of useable storage.

www.drobo.com/products/capacity-calculator/

 

[Magician717]

Thanks for all of the replies.

I have now reformatted into an 8tB Volume.

Problem was caused from a throwback of simply buying the drive and a single 2tB (the biggest drives out back then!) and then adding as I went.