yakk0.org » hard drive http://www.yakk0.org a blog on technology in the real world Sun, 05 Sep 2010 08:00:00 +0000 en hourly 1 http://wordpress.org/?v=3.0.1 Increasing max capacity on Drobo (or how my network learned to hate me) http://www.yakk0.org/2009/01/14/increasing-max-capacity-on-drobo-or-how-my-network-learned-to-hate-me/ http://www.yakk0.org/2009/01/14/increasing-max-capacity-on-drobo-or-how-my-network-learned-to-hate-me/#comments Thu, 15 Jan 2009 03:50:54 +0000 Jeremy http://www.yakk0.org/?p=196 My wonderful wife got me a 1.5TB drive for my Drobo for Christmas. Currently the little storage robot has 3 500GB drives configured for a max capacity of 4TB. When I got the device, I thought that it’d be longer until the larger drives came down in price and figured it’d be enough. Boy, was I wrong. that 1.5TB drive was around $100 when we got it. The 500GB drives were around the same price in June when I got the drobo. Hard drive prices are plummeting, so I figured that I’d reconfigure the Drobo for the current max of 16TB now while I had the chance. It’ll be a long time before I can fill that up…right?

The downside to this is that you have to format the Drobo to reconfigure the max capacity. This is due to the magic voodoo that Drobo does to allow you to add actual capacity by replacing a smaller drive with a larger one. The good news is that I had about 700GB used out of 1.36TB available (1.5GB minus Drobo’s RAID-like overhead), and I have an empty 1.5TB drive ready to be filled with useless crap. I also have a handy USB to IDE/SATA adapter for connecting an internal hard drive to a USB port. I couldn’t find the connecter though. When I gave up searching I realized that the only computer I have that uses SATA drives was my home Linux server. So the SATA power connector from the DVD drive of my home Linux server is temporarily powering the 1.5TB drive. Crude, but it works.

The next problem I had was how to best copy the data. Many of the files are media files like my iTunes library for my home desktop and TivoToGo transfers, but I also have Applications from my Mac backed up there. I quickly found that those don’t transfer so well from Windows and Linux. That only left my Macbook Pro. I could hook it to the gigabit port of the Airport Extreme, but I opted for a little slower transfer and am using the Wireless-N network and my mac. After getting the drive hooked up to the USB of my Airport Extreme I connected the drive, formatted it as HFS+, then copied some files in Finder…

That was a mistake. It took forever and canceling took as long. I then went to the Terminal and did a lot of copying there. It worked well, but slow. Over the past two weeks I’ve gotten 200GB or so transferred. Over the weekend I got a bright idea to try and speed the copying part up. I’ve begun to compress the directories with bzip2. It doesn’t do a lot on some files, but on others it’s been over 50% compression. I can also do more at once. I’ll have a couple directories compress as I am transferring others. I’m hoping that by February I’ll have this whole project done.

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