My Drobo was at 4TB used and reporting 80 hours to relayout the drive incorporating the new disk replacing the failed one. The only thing on my Drobo is backups. All my important data is on a 1TB USB drive.
So, I asked myself, why am I waiting? I can lose the backups. Then I'm thinking if everytime I lose a drive in my Drobo array, I end up reformatting the array and losing the data then why bother with a Drobo in the first place. What a waste of money! Given I can't use it as my main drive because it's too slow, it's only useful as a backup drive and when a drive fails on it, I have reformatted it ergo, why even bother...
I reformatted it then. Volume management on it is pretty poor. Basically you pick a maximum volume size and if that is < the available space then you can make multiple volumes that size. In my case, I have about 5TB usable space. If I make a volume 4TB volume then it lets me make two 4TB volumes. If I say 2TB then it lets me make 4 2TB volumes. What I can't do is what I want to do...
I want to make a 3TB volume for backups and a 13TB volume for slow raided data. You can't do it. This way if time machine goes crazy again, I can just reformat the 3TB volume and not lose the other data. But, this is impossible with Drobo.
So, I'm stuck with making two 4TB volumes, one for time machine and the other for 'slowdata'. I don't want to have a 4TB time machine volume but there are no other options besides a bunch of 2TB volumes.
I'm currently using superduper to make a smart image of my 1TB drive in the Drobo 4TB 'slowdata' volume. Once thats done, then I'll start time machine again using the Drobo 4TB 'TM' volume.
This is why you look forward to getting home from a road trip and enjoying your weekend, not...