Drobo

The drobo showed up yesterday. The unboxing was as cool as with an Apple product. And it is really easy to setup and start using... as long as you are plugging it into a Mac or PC. The instructions don't say anything about how to get it to work on Linux. Luckily I found this via google:

[root@192.168.1.1]# lshw
[root@192.168.1.1]# /sbin/mke2fs -j -i 262144 -L Drobo -m 0 -O sparse_super,^resize_inode -q /dev/sdc
[root@192.168.1.1]# mkdir /drobo
[root@192.168.1.1]# mount -t ext3 /dev/sdc /drobo
[root@192.168.1.1]# vi /etc/fstab
       /dev/sdc   /drobo  ext3    defaults     0 0

That was all I needed to get me going. I thought I had a bunch of old hard drives lying around that I would be able to wedge into drobo until I could afford to buy real drives, but none of them are SATA. Darn. Another bummer is that my server has a firewire plug that is heart-shaped and resembles a mac firewire, but the firewire plug on drobo is square. So I think I'm stuck with USB. My first speed test writing to drobo shows 14.8MB/sec. That feels pretty lame.

Another weird thing is that the drobo shows the full capacity of the array, not the actual capacity. That is, I put two 1TB drives in it and it looks like this with df -h:

/dev/sde         2.0T   155G   1.9T   8%   /drobo

I expected drobo to report the capacity of the array to be about 1TB instead of 2TB.