Comments for David Trumbell

Comment on Drobo: Thin Provisioning by Jkw

Jkw — Fri, 29 Apr 2011 03:00:00 +0000

Drobo is a horse shit company that totally mis represented the need to do “maximum” volume creation first if you plan to really scale beyond the size of your original drive. Anyone who says to buy another drobo or hard drive to
Migrate your data and then reestablish a larger volume to transfer your data back to is essentially saying their product is a failure as it does not simply scale unless you the user had the foresight to know how large beyond your current capacity you would need to be in the future.

Comment on Drobo: Thin Provisioning by Nick Choy

Nick Choy — Tue, 22 Mar 2011 13:19:00 +0000

Mate, I’m with you on this one. I bought a Drobo thinking that it’ll be really easy to expand by simply putting in a new hard drive. So when I inserted a new 2TB drive and it came up as a new volume, I was very surprised. I’ve spent almost a few hours a day for a whole week trying to consolidate the volumes into one. The main problem is that I have a TM volume on the Drobo which, although is 800GB, sits on a volume that is 2TB.

I’m trying to transfer this volume and the only way possible is by creating a 1:1 clone. I have a spare 1TB hard drive here which I was intending to clone to.. but because of the way cloning works, I actually need to clone to a spare 2TB hard drive, then reformat the drobo, then transfer it back.

Jim Sherhart / Drobo, you’ve told us that it is “unfortunate” but WHY is it unfortunate? Is it unfortunate that the Company doesn’t have the expertise? Is it unfortunate that we made a poor investment decision? WHY is it that Drobo can’t resize like the Drobo Elite?

Drobo Inc, you’re better than this. We expect better from you.

Comment on Drobo: Thin Provisioning by Frank

Frank — Thu, 28 Oct 2010 02:24:00 +0000

I’ll go further than suggesting “misleading.” David Trumbell is far too kind. I’ve been lied to about the ease with which Drobo can be expanded and configured, and I don’t like it all. I purchased two new 2tb drives and slipped them into the expansion bays of a Drobo system with 2 1.5 tb drives, and lo and behold, Drobo did not recognize them as increased space. As David suggested, we were never warned that formatting the hardware to match the original drive sizes limited expansion. To make the device reasonably useful and to have it act as advertised I will need to go out and buy a 2gb drive to move all the data off the Drobo, reformat Drobo, and then move all the data back. Why buy a Drobo in the first place? If I had the time and energy, I would sue for misrepresentation in small claims court. I don’t have the time, so I’ll simply resort to badmouthing Drobo. This is really incredibly dumb, or really, really incompetent design. Drobo, you want me to buy more products? Seriously? Why?

Comment on Drobo: Thin Provisioning by Dan McLinden

Dan McLinden — Thu, 15 Apr 2010 04:22:47 +0000

Never mind, I got the new volume to trigger by disconnect and restart

Comment on Drobo: Thin Provisioning by Dan McLinden

Dan McLinden — Thu, 15 Apr 2010 04:22:00 +0000

Never mind, I got the new volume to trigger by disconnect and restart

Comment on Drobo: Thin Provisioning by Dan McLinden

Dan McLinden — Thu, 15 Apr 2010 04:02:21 +0000

Hi Jim,

I bought my Drobo last summer and setup a 2TB partition (I presume) by default at the time. Tonight I slid in a new 1TB drive and so now I have 735gb unallocated disk. I stopped creation of the new volume before realizing that I could not extend the existing one.

It looks like a tool to resize a Drobo partition is available in the Pro and Elite products but not my regular 2nd-gen Drobo.

Are there plans to extend this tool into the rest of the product-line and if not, is there a way to re-trigger creation of a new volume using the dashboard ? I couldn’t find anything on the site.

Thanks.

Comment on Drobo: Thin Provisioning by Dan McLinden

Dan McLinden — Thu, 15 Apr 2010 04:02:00 +0000

Hi Jim,

It looks like a tool to resize a Drobo partition is available in the Pro and Elite products but not my regular 2nd-gen Drobo.

Are there plans to extend this tool into the rest of the product-line and if not, is there a way to re-trigger creation of a new volume using the dashboard ? I couldn’t find anything on the site.

Thanks.

Comment on Drobo: Thin Provisioning by Scott

Scott — Tue, 06 Apr 2010 22:37:04 +0000

This is something that I’ve been longing for myself. I would love to be able to dynamically resize a Drobo volume. Aside from the obvious problem of limiting the size, this removes the side effect of the thin provisioning preventing applications like Truecrypt from being able to encrypt the entire device.

If I were able to control the volume size on the Drobo, using Truecrypt for FDE would become a possibility (even if it meant decrypting everything before resizing the volume, while annoying and timing, it’s understandable and still feasible).

Comment on Drobo: Thin Provisioning by Scott

Scott — Tue, 06 Apr 2010 22:37:00 +0000

Comment on Drobo: Thin Provisioning by David Trumbell

David Trumbell — Sun, 14 Mar 2010 00:58:10 +0000

Jim – Thanks for the response. While changing the default is a temporary fix, I don’t see it as a long term solution (what if I go over 16 TB??). Is there any plan to offer a tool to resize a Drobo partition?