I have finally started to transfer years of home video from MiniDV tapes to my hard drive. I have attempted to do some in the past, but often storage and computing power was too restrictive to move all my raw home video to the hard drive. I was left with just adding a few videos here and there.

Well since I upgraded to a Macmini last year and have been using my first generation Drobo, both of these limitation have been reduced. I say reduced; because video, even non HD format takes a lot of space.
I started with about 300GB left on my Drobo and got through half my tapes when I started to get low space alerts from the Drobo dashboard. I currently had two 750GB and two 1TB drives in the Drobo. So it looks like I needed to add more storage, the whole point of getting a Drobo in the first place. So a quick trip to the local Best Buy and I picked up a Seagate 2TB SATA drive for under $140.

The upgrade of storage is as easy as Datarobotics advertises. Just pop out the smallest drive, in my case it was the 750GB drive in bay 1. While the computer is still running (this is clearly a strength of Drobo). Then insert the new 2TB drive. The lights start flashing as the new drive is detected, formatted and “assimilated” into the collective. So far really easy.

Here comes the sticking point. Though I was able to access the drive for small files, I noticed that if I were to try and upload more miniDV tape that the Drobo would reboot. I did this several times with the same result. So I decided to wait till the data was redistributed across the new drive, which Datarobotics calls “relayout”. Here is the only gripe about the process. The total relayout took 55 hours! Wow that did take a long time. I had minimal use of the Macmini until then as the Drobo was churning along. I was constantly afraid that the unit may reboot and have to restart the relayout process after hours of work or worse loose 3.2TB of data. This length of time may have something to do with my having many large files on the Drobo 1.5GB+ and that the new drive was twice as large as the next drive making it a principal drive for data protection.

Advanced Controls - Drobo
Uploaded with plasq‘s Skitch!

Well I can say that the drive did complete the process without any further glitches or data loss. And I can happily say that the drive is back to its usual self.

In short I still love my Drobo, I would not trust my desktop data to any other solution but give plenty of time for relayout when adding a large drive.

Future: To remove this potential single point of failure I could add a second Drobo to backup the first but would still need an offsite solution (in case of flood, fire etc). Now that the amount of data has gotten so large I am seriously considering an offsite storage solution like Carbonite. They offer unlimited storage offsite for a single annual fee. I realize that the first upload of data could take months but the subsequent ones should happen overnight in the background. Stay tuned for developments in this area.

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