David Trumbell's Blog - Latest Comments

Re: About

Paul — Thu, 03 May 2012 10:17:44 -0000

Yo Gator! (at least i think you're Gator, since I am The Peddler, and we all know who Tip Top was based on his perfect BMI. So i guess it was between Gator and Spoke and I think you were the Gatorade lover)

Anyway, it's Furlow (if you hadn't figured it out). First, how the heck are things on your side of "the pond?" I really hope you and Faye are doing wonderfully! I've been in NYC now for 4 years and I'm still very much enjoying it. I can imagine the possibilities you two have in Europe for exploration.
To cut to the chase, my girlfriend Jennie (you may remember her) and I are planing a trip out to London and Paris over Thanksgiving this year and we are contacting people to get an idea of cool neighborhoods we should stay in, things we must definitely see/do, places we must eat and any other recommendations you knowledgeable people might have for travelers like us. Furthermore, if you guys are around during the Thanksgiving holiday (which i've heard is huge in England) it would be a blast to get together for drinks->dinner->more drinks at least one of the nights we're in London Town. I have no idea if this is going to get to you via the Comment's section on your blog but i figured it was worth a shot. As they say, CHEERS!
-Paul

Re: Drobo: Thin Provisioning

Jkw — Thu, 28 Apr 2011 23:00:34 -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.

Re: Drobo: Thin Provisioning

Nick Choy — Tue, 22 Mar 2011 09:19:23 -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.

Re: Drobo: Thin Provisioning

Frank — Wed, 27 Oct 2010 22:24:08 -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?

Re: Drobo: Thin Provisioning

Dan McLinden — Thu, 15 Apr 2010 00:22:47 -0000

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

Re: Drobo: Thin Provisioning

Dan McLinden — Thu, 15 Apr 2010 00:02:21 -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.

Re: Drobo: Thin Provisioning

Scott — Tue, 06 Apr 2010 18:37:04 -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).

Re: Drobo: Thin Provisioning

David Trumbell — Sat, 13 Mar 2010 19:58:10 -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?

Re: Drobo: Thin Provisioning

Jim Sherhart — Fri, 12 Mar 2010 12:26:39 -0000

David - Sorry about your frustration. As mentioned by one of the commenters, we have now changed the default volume size to 16TB assuming the host OS can support this. Windows XP and some older operating systems only supported volumes up to 2TB.

Unfortunately the size of the first volume you create sets precedence for future volumes once drive capacity exceeds the size of the volume. You can still continue to increase your capacity, but the Drobo will show up as multiple 2TB drives instead of a single drive.

While I know this is not ideal, if you can copy your data temporarily from the Drobo to another storage device, you can reformat the volume to 16TB which would then be the default for all volumes going forward.

Regards,

Jim Sherhart
Data Robotics, Inc.

Re: Drobo: Thin Provisioning

Matthew Trumbell — Fri, 05 Mar 2010 10:53:31 -0000

There's always e-bay. ;) And you can reuse the drives...

The assumptions of the poster below are a little...strange, not to mention detached from the info you presented. You even got a lecture on proper problem solving. So helpful!

Info on working with their thin provisioning technology seems pretty hard to come by, aside from initial setup. I will say that the technology sounds pretty cool. Upgrading a regular old RAID array is a bit of a pain (usually a disk-by-disk upgrade with a RAID rebuild in between each, then you still have to deal with growing your partitions). It is technically possible, but somewhat of a risky op. It seems that with either Drobo or RAID, unless you have a separate device with equal amounts of capacity to do a full backup, you are going to feel a bit of pain.

As a possible workaround: have you considered using symlinks to distribute data across multiple partitions? Not a great solution, really, but it is what I do in my RAID-less, Drobo-less world of external USB drives.

BTW, this post is on the first page of Google for a search on "resize drobo partition".

Re: Drobo: Thin Provisioning

David Trumbell — Fri, 05 Mar 2010 05:31:27 -0000

I have to admit I should have started here. However, it's hard to overlook how attractive something like a Drobo is (especially if you want to save time during setup) and I'm kind of stuck now that I have made the investment in the Drobo. I will definitely look further into a vanilla Linux box to augment what I already have when I'm in need of a new storage device.

Re: Drobo: Thin Provisioning

G. Canidae — Fri, 05 Mar 2010 01:09:09 -0000

So what is the problem? That you have multiple 2TB drives mounted? I have had a Drobo since 8/07. I don't recall them ever saying anything more than that you can increase the capacity of your Drobo "forever".... it is the "forever" claim that is suspect, not that there is a 2 TB "chuck size" for upgrades. FWIW, this is only a limitation of the first gen product and it was because dumb XP can't grow beyond 2 TB. My most recent Drobopro defaults to 16TB.

FWIW, it seems that your problem resolution strategy is fatally flawed, and potentially lethal -- the vendor's site was your last resort after trying several other sources.

Re: Drobo: Thin Provisioning

Matthew Trumbell — Thu, 04 Mar 2010 12:26:38 -0000

Boo!

This is the main reason I'm wary of solutions like Drobo to begin with. With a proprietary-ish OS, a proprietary filesystem, and a smallish user base good luck finding a hack to work around it. I will say, though, that such resizing operations are possible on general purpose linux (which is what Drobo is based on under all that candy coating). So there is some hope.

But you should forget all that: do a BYO linux machine with a RAID card. You'll spend a weekend setting it up, but you'll have a lot of online support building it, you'll have plenty of online support if anything goes wrong, you get full control AND you get a general purpose machine with your storage solution.

Re: Fraud on Ebay

liam moracen — Thu, 26 Nov 2009 10:06:12 -0000

the same guy done all the same things to me
i fell for it at the time as it was my first time using ebay
if you want to know any more email me

Re: Browsing the web is for saps.

Doug — Thu, 17 Sep 2009 18:46:18 -0000

I use Google reader, too. I actually only use one computer (which is awesome, by the way), until you count my iPhone. I just found this Google reader client for Mac:

http://www.grumlapp.com/

Looks pretty good at first glance.