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I have recently bought a Drobo 5D to replace a load of external Lacie hard drives (the hard drives were subsequently removed from their enclosures and put into the Drobo).

The Drobo currently has 5x 2TB drives, all working great.

My question is, if I removed all 5 drives, and then stored them off-site, would they work fine once plugged back in to the Drobo? Even if a 2nd set of 5 drives were used in the same Drobo?

Effectively I want to back up all my data to two sets of hard drives, using a single Drobo. Would they take ages to rebuild if I start swapping full sets of hard drives in and out?

I realise this issue can be sorted by buying a 2nd Drobo and mirroring them, but at this stage it's too expensive (I plan to do so in the future though).

Thanks!

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  • I reccomend that you do not start swapping out hard drives from the array and consider that to be a backup. I have had RAID rebuilds fail on me far too often to even consider doing that. What RAID level are you running at? 5? 6? How much data are you currently using out of that array? Raid 5 would mean you have 7.5 TB of useable space.. Raid 6 would be around 6.5 TB... How much of this are you using?
    – Richie086
    Apr 16, 2014 at 22:36
  • Also, does the drobo support iSCSI, NAS Stacking, or any mirroring technology? Sorry, i am not familiar with drobo at all but I am quite familiar with several other NAS device manufacturers.
    – Richie086
    Apr 16, 2014 at 22:37

1 Answer 1

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A disk pack should be able to be taken out of a Drobo and moved to another one. I've tested this with a 1st Gen Drobo and a Drobo S. Though it was never clear to me if they needed to remain in the same order, so I label which is disk 1 - 5.

Thankfully I've never needed to try this in a live environment.

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