drobo dashboard windows not seeing drive

#Drobo dashboard windows not seeing drive Pc

On the back, you have a gaping hole that acts as the exit for the cooling fan, a power connector, and ports for USB and FireWire 800. The drive itself is very simple – a black box with front access to four quick-release drive bays (you dont even need to put drives in a tray – just slide the bare drives in), a light next to each bay for drive status, an array of blue LEDs on the bottom to show you how “full” the drive is at a glance, and then a power and activity LED. If you have four 1 terabyte drives, for example, you end up with 2.7TB of disk space where the typical RAID-5 setup would yield 3TB.

It seems to waste a little bit more of the traditional drive capacity of say, RAID 5, but the amount of wasted space depends heavily upon how you have it “stocked” with drives. The technology behind the drobo is amazing. In essence – the folks at Data Robotics have given you a standalone redundant storage system that is intelligent enough to manage itself and simple enough for your mother to use. The Drobo is basically a RAID unit – but unlike traditional RAID units – it doesn’t prompt you with 10 billion different configuration options, hassle you with the configuration complexities of RAID, nor even require you to insert four drives of the same brand, model, or size. For those of you who have not seen one yet – they’re a cool little box with four hot-swap SATA drive bays and a pretty intelligent stack of electronics ( click here for a look ). This means that all of my data is in a central location – on the server, easy to backup and restore but vulnerable to an outage like the one I experienced this week when the server dies.Įnter the Drobo. Granted I don’t have the typical home setup, I am fortunate in that I have designed the system such that my Domain Controller uses group policy to map all of the traditional “documents folders” on each of the machines to a network drive. My home network contains about a terabyte of RAW data on the server and a total capacity of about 6.5TB of drive space across all of the machines in the house. I have discovered, however, that I am quickly running out of space for backups. In this instance, I was able to restore all of my data from these drives without incident. Fortunately for me, I have always had a couple of 1TB Western Digital external drives hooked to my machine with scheduled Robocopy jobs that sync data off of the RAID array to the externals as a crude form of backup. On Monday of this week, my Windows 2003R2 server machine decided to crap out on me while I was installing a backup battery on my Intel SRCS28X SATA RAID card. To complicate matters further, many home networks like my own have multiple client PCs, sophisticated server machines, virtual machines, domain controllers, network appliances and an increasingly complex selection of devices that need reliable backup space. With these increasingly large drives and increasingly large home systems comes an increasingly large requirement for reliable backup storage.

#Drobo dashboard windows not seeing drive Pc

Advanced configurations are starting to even include RAID setups in a standard home PC that push beyond 2TB of raw disk space. Unlike a few years ago – the average home PC now has upwards of 750GB to 1TB of disk space. As we progress through 2009, we have finally seen the release of a 3.5″ desktop SATA 2TB hard disk drive.