Partitioning and formatting Drobo Pro

[James Dunn]

I have a Drobo Pro with around 18GB of usuable space, however I have tried to format it using the drobom command line tools and it only shows 2TB for the second drive. See the output of sudo drobom info below.

I have set the lunsize to 16TB with this command:

sudo drobom set lunsize 16

How can I use the full amount of space available?

---------------------------------------------------------
Drobo Name: DroboPro   Devices: /dev/sde:/dev/sdf
      Time: Fri Aug 29 17:42:17 2014
---------------------------------------------------------
Configuration maxima: slots: 8, luns: 16, lunsize: 36028814 TB
Capacity (in GB):  used: 4, free: 20646, total: 20650
protocol version:  0.11
SCSI emulation information:
Vendor: DROBO     Model: DroboPro         Revision: 1.00
/dev/sde: bus=scsi10 channel=0 id=0 lun=0 (vendor=DROBO   , version=30527)
/dev/sdf: bus=scsi10 channel=0 id=0 lun=1 (vendor=DROBO   , version=30527)
query slotinfo result:  number of slots: 8
slot   GB                Model               Status
   0 2000      SAMSUNG HD204UI                green
   1 4000 WDC WD4001FAEX-00MJRA0                green
   2 3000   ST3000DM001-9YN166                green
   3 3000   ST3000DM001-9YN166                green
   4 3000 WDC WD30EZRX-00MMMB0                green
   5 3000 WDC WD30EZRX-00MMMB0                green
   6 3000   ST3000DM001-9YN166                green
   7 4000 WDC WD4001FAEX-00MJRA0                green
Firmware: 1.2.2
Revision: 2.56 ( 43538 ) built: Oct  7 2011,11:32:31
Features: NO_AUTO_REBOOT,NO_FAT32_FORMAT,USED_CAPACITY_FROM_HOST,DISKPACKSTATUS,ENCRYPT_NOHEADER,CMD_STATUS_QUERIABLE,VARIABLE_LUN_SIZE_1_16,PARTITION_LUN_GPT_MBR,FAT32_FORMAT_VOLNAME,SUPPORTS_NEW_LUNINFO2,feature x0800,LUN_MANAGEMENT,feature x2000 ,SUPPORTS_OPTIONS2,SUPPORTS_SHUTDOWN,leftovers (0x460000)
/dev/sde:/dev/sdf - DroboPro 00% full - ([], 0)
query options result:
    UseStaticIPAddress False
    UseManualVolumeManagement True
    YellowThreshold 85
    SpinDownDelayMinutes 15
    RedThreshold 95
    SpinDownDelay True
    NetMask 255.255.0.0
    DualDiskRedundancy False
    IPAddress 169.254.1.0
lun     size (GB) used    PTFmt  FStype:
  0    17592         4      GPT ['HFS']
  1    17592         0      GPT ['HFS']
---------------------------------------------------------

[Peter Silva]

HFS is rather uncommon under Linux... I guess you chose that because of this:

http://support.drobo.com/app/answers/detail/a_id/23/~/what-volume-sizes-may-i-use-and-what-happens-if-my-disk-space-exceeds-my-volume.

drobom has done what you ask, you can see the lun 0 (likely /dev/sde) and lun 1 (/dev/sdf) have been created and their lunsize is 16T (17592GB).

looks fine.  Have a look at this:

http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=1229340

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[James Dunn]

I chose HFS+ because I attempted to set up two 16TB volumes on my macbook first. Then I tried to format the drobo with drobom in Debian and I assumed it would overwrite any existing partitions, but it seems to have kept the HFS+ partition.

I installed hfsprogs and have just started parted from the command line which doesn't seem to respond. I guess it's a big drive..

What would the recommended way to set up 2 x 16TB partitions? Preferably as ext3, but I'm also open to whatever is considered the better filesystem for this purpose (attached to linux server via USB).

thanks.

[Peter Silva]

As the web page shows, if you want ext3, then you can only use 8TiB LUNS, not 16.

Once you do that, given the storage reported by drobom you should end up seeing four devices (something like: /dev/sde,f,g and h).   Just partition and build the file systems normally using gparted,

and you should be set.

Make sure you do not do ext4.  Drobo does not support ext4.   If you want to make sure your set up works, the simplest way to do it is to fill up one of the luns, noting the number of lights, or the reported utilisation by drobom.   Then you remove everything, and, after a few hours, the drobo should reduce the number of lights lit.   If the lights don't go out, a likely reason is a file system incompatibility where it cannot identify and space available for re-use.  If you continue to use the file system, it will just fill up monotonically (files that are erased will continue to be allocated) until it is full and then cease to be writable.   This might not be an issue when the entire LUN is backed up by physical space, but once the total space used by all the LUNS exceeds what is available, likely all the devices will cease to be writable.

[James Dunn]

Thanks. Which webpage are you referring to? drobo.com or drobo-utils.sourceforge.net?

So should I make 8TB partitions using Drobo dashboard, or can this be done in drobo-utils?

[Peter Silva]

both/either...

was referring to the drobo.com description of supported LUN sizes.

for setting lunsizes:

drobom setlunsize 8

or using a dashboard... they are equivalent.

[James Dunn]

thanks.

I created 4 x 8TB HFS+ volumes in Drobo Dashboard, then plugged the Drobo Pro into the linux server and ran

sudo drobom -d /dev/sde format ext3
PleaseEraseMyData

This then resulted in the following output from lsblk:

sde      8:64   0     8T  0 disk
└─sde1   8:65   0     8T  0 part
sdf      8:80   0     2T  0 disk
└─sdf1   8:81   0     2T  0 part
sdg      8:96   0     2T  0 disk
└─sdg1   8:97   0     2T  0 part

Not sure where the other volume has disappeared to, but more importantly drobo-utils seems to only be able to add see 2TB drives after the first 8TB.

[Peter Silva]

I dunno... Perhaps set lun size for sdf? Then sdg?

Might want to build file systems on sdf and sdg and see what df says their size is.

It might be a display error... I never had enough stuff to test that far...  By that I mean that it might be only Drobo utils mis-displaying

I think drobom has some d sort of bug when formatting multiple luns... You might have to format the other luns manually.