Who else is waiting for Drobo with 3TB support?

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Drobo 2nd-gen

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ryantc May 26, 2011

Who else is waiting for Drobo with 3TB support?

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rlines 2 years ago

While they support 16 tb the second gen 4 bay Drobo does not support drives larger than 2 tb. So with 4 drives that gives you 8 tb or ~6tb usable. Not quite the 16 TB that is promised and with us almost 2/3 of the way through Q2 of 2011 I am wondering when the firmware update will come along.

I personally have 2 Drobos and both of them are getting full. While I still could upgrade some of the drives to 2TB it seems like a waste of money as I have one drobo with 1x2tb and 3x1.5tb drives and the other one has 2x2tb, 1x1.5tb and 1x1tb. The second one I could put another 2tb drive in to replace the 1tb drive and get myself another 1tb of storage but I would much rather replace it with a 3tb drive and get that extra bump. Seeing as how I just put a 2tb drive in there to replace another 1tb drive and it took 3 days to restripe the data I spent a week unprotected. I was just glad that it is my backup drive and I spent that week hoping that I wouldn't loose my primary Drobo if the rebuild went south.

The situation on my primary Drobo the tradeoff for upgrading a drive is even less. Buy a 2tb drive and only gain 500gb of space.

I was disappointed that they have left this model to languish with no firmware update seeing as we bought into Drobo before they got into the SMB business or the Enterprise type markets.

So in short... yes I am waiting but not very patiently...

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cass 2011-05-26 09:33:03

You never had to wait! The current Drobo supports up to 16TB of storage.

Product page: drobo.com/products/drobo.php

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cvee 2011-07-31 10:23:16

I'm in a similar boat. I have purchased 1x3tb drive ready to go in.. with others to follow. My first drive light has gone orange... so i need to add more capacity asap. Arrghhh!!!! Looking to get a Thecus as primary backup... and Drobo will be a secondary.

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planbe 2011-07-31 13:36:38

I see Drobo has changed their website from Q2 of 2011 to "Drobo (4-bay 2nd Gen) - later this year", nice Drobo. Step up and support your product as promised.
support.drobo.com/app/answers/detail/a_id/506/sess...

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wyre 2011-10-09 21:47:00

I am in the same boat, I have the original Drobo 4 Bay and although it has been promised, they have yet to add 3tb support! Im thinking by the end of the year if they do not add support then we should start a petition.

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rlines 2011-10-10 10:30:51

They have now added the support. The firmware update is not in the drobo dashboard check for updates stream. You have to go to the website and download the file and go through the manual update process that they have listed on the website. Not the best release but so far I am stable with my old drives. I have yet to purchase 3 tb drives and install them. I plan to do it in my DR device first and see that it is stable and then do the update to my main one.

wyre 2011-10-10 10:46:07

I looked under drobo firmware release notes and it says:
 This version of Drobo firmware is compatible with Drobo Gen 2 only. You can check if your Drobo is a Gen 2 device by looking at the back of the unit for a FireWire connection.

Do you have the drobo with or without the firewire connection? I have the original that just connects via usb and according to this the 3tb support is only for 2nd gen drobos with the firewire port on the back.

rlines 2011-10-10 10:48:29

Ah. I missed the note about it being the original. Unfortunately they end of lifed that unit and have not intent to update the firmware for that one to support it. Though I think that from the first KB article for 3tb+ drives they hadn't planned to release an update.