[Cialug] external storage

[Dave J. Hala Jr.]

I haven't used the Drobo personally, but here's something I found in the
drobo forums:

 To give some further info on my Linux experience:  I am using kernel
2.6.18.8 x86_64 on the Quad Xeon server described above, and the Drobo
is formatted hfs+ with no journalling.  I also ripped the USB cable out
of my Linux server in the middle of a copy.  After that, the Drobo would
only mount read-only, with the hfsplus driver complaining about the
drobo not being dismounted cleanly.  To fix it, I hooked the drobo up to
a mac.  It took about 60 seconds of hard drive thrashing for the Mac to
mount it.  After that I did NOT run any disk utilities on the Mac.  I
simply ejected it, and then hooked it back up to the Linux server.  All
happy once again, and read-write too.  So it seems the Mac will clean
the file system before it mounts.

 To protect myself from the stupidity of accidentally doing this in the
future, I labelled the Drobo with evms and use autofs to mount it.  So
now when I try to access it, it automounts, and then after 120seconds of
inactivity it dismounts.  My experience so far shows that the Drobo
works VERY happily with Linux with the following caveats:

      * best to use hfsplus because ext3 is not supported for unused
        block recovery and updating of the usage meter (the blue
        lights).  My tests seem to indicate that on recent linux kernels
        this works rather reliably.
      * best to keep a mac handy to repair the filesystem in case of a
        dirty dismount
      * no dashboard.

Other than that, I'm happy and am going to put this into
non-primary-storage production on my 7x24 linux server when I'm done
with my testing.


On Wed, 2007-10-17 at 17:16 -0500, David W. Body wrote:
> I'm curious if anyone on the list has experience or opinions about  
> Drobo ("the world's first storage robot").
> 
>    http://www.drobo.com/
> 
> --David W. Body / Big Creek Software, LLC
> 
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