Last Friday I had an influx of new drives to feed the brimming-full Drobos – six shiny new 3 TB drives. After a bit of pondering, I placed three into my main work Drobo S, took the three of 2TB drives that came out and put them into my fourth Drobo (I have two second-generation Drobos, and one Drobo S – the first generation Drobo has been retired).
One thing worth noting, is that the fuller a Drobo is, the longer it takes in data-protection mode to redistribute the data. Each time I added a 3 TB drive to the Drobo S, it took approximately a day to rebalance itself. A testament to the robustness of the Drobo S was when I was installing the newest Drobo, I accidentally disconnected the power to the Drobo S *while it was in data protection mode*.
Let me tell you, that was a tense few minutes while I finished up what I was doing, reconnected the Drobo S and powered it up. After a bit of a dramatic pause, it just continued on it’s merry way and finished reorganizing the data. *whew*.
The newest Drobo, after some pondering and keeping with the “shelter” theme I have going has been named “The Hole”. Bonus points for anyone that gets that reference. Hint: It’s Canadian.
The Bomb Shelter, Fallout Shelter, and The Hole:
The fourth drive went into my Mac Pro, replacing my 2 TB Time Machine/Storage drive, and doubled the available room for my Time Machine backups.
The remaining two 3 TB drives and the 2 TB drive from the Mac Pro will be rotated into my pool of drives used to back up my Drobos off-site, getting clever names like: BS-DroboBU-3-D79 (Bomb Shelter Drobo BackUp Disk 3, Drive number 79), FS-DroboBU-5-D80 (Fallout Shelter Drobo BackUp Disk5, Drive number 80), and FS-DroboBU-4-D56 (you can figure this one out yourself).
I’ve already written about my backup methods and the spreadsheet I use to manage my collection of hard drives.
Yes, that’s 74 terabytes
This is a good time to pause here for a moment and reflect on hard drive sizes. The most recent batch of drives’ *cache* is over six times larger than my first hard drive, and the drive itself is over three hundred thousand times larger.
At least I’ve stopped saying “I’ll never fill this.“
I still think you need to do a Tom’s storage over time post. :)
That could be entertaining, I suppose.