DroboDashboard
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You can't always trust Drobo Dashboard
Is your Drobo up to date? Don't trust Drobo Dashboard for the answer. Drobo and I have not been getting along this week. I have two Drobo units: a FireWire model and a USB model. I moved them to my office last week, and the USB model started complaining about being low on space. The Drobo Dashboard showed drives in all four bays, and since I hadn't been low on space before, I was confused as to what had happened. About a day later, I checked again (after working hard to delete anything unnecessary) and it showed a missing drive in one of the bays. Not a failed drive, but a missing drive. I shut the Drobo down completely, ejected the drive, and mounted it back on the iMac. Suddenly I had a lot of free space, but Drobo was acting like I had just put in a new hard drive. It took two days for it to sort itself out. Everything seemed fine until I was using my iMac a few days later. Suddenly, my iMac said "You have ejected [my FireWire Drobo] without unmounting it." I told it that I had done no such thing, I hadn't ejected anything. I couldn't get the Drobo to remount, even after rebooting. It would work via USB, and it would work via FireWire with my MacBook Pro, but not with the iMac. I worked with AppleCare to diagnose the problem, and they asked me if my Drobo firmware was up to date. I said it was, and that it was one of the first things I had checked, using the latest version of Drobo Dashboard. My answer was true... except that Drobo Dashboard wasn't telling me about the latest firmware. I spent all day on Friday talking with AppleCare, running diagnostics, driving back to my house to get my original install CDs, calling AppleCare again, running more tests, and finally having them agree to send a technician out to replace the logic board on my iMac. He arrived this morning (Tuesday) and spent an hour doing the replacement. About an hour later, the Drobo started acting up again. The install of Snow Leopard was only a week old and I had a completely new logic board, so I was starting to suspect the Drobo. I called Drobo support and their tech asked me if I was running the latest version of the firmware. "Oh yes," I said with confidence, "I checked in Drobo Dashboard this morning." "There's a newer version on our website," he replied.
Drobo Dashboard can show used/available space
Drobo was a bit of a life-saver for me. Before Drobo I had about 13 different hard drives storing different kinds of data (music on one, video on another, pictures on another, etc). My Drobo let me bring those all together in a very cool way. I just stumbled across a new-to-me feature of the Drobo Dashboard (the Mac application used to control your Drobo) which allows me to do two things I enjoy: 1. Free up space on my menu bar 2. Utilize space on my Dock better While I was looking for something else, I clicked on the Drobo Dashboard menu, and saw the options shown in the picture. Actually when I saw it the line which reads "Show Menu Bar Icon" said "Hide Menu Bar Icon." So I clicked on it, because I love getting things off my menu bar, and I rarely looked at the Drobo menu bar icon. What I did not realize was that when you hide the menu bar icon, the Dock icon for Drobo changes from a static Drobo logo a pie chart you see in the image here (4th from the bottom, in case that isn't clear). As you can see, I have about 22% of my Drobo available. (I assume at that color will turn yellow when I get below 15% available space, or red if I get below 5% free space, as those are the colors and thresholds that I believe Drobo uses for "low" and "critical" levels, respectively.) I haven't used the Drobo Dashboard for awhile so I am not sure how "new" this feature is, but it is a welcome option. The Dock icon is much easier to read than the menu bar version, and it frees up valuable real estate in the menu bar. I could not find a way to turn off both the menu bar and the dock display -- you have to choose one or the other. Also, if you have not looked at "DroboCopy" it's worth checking out as well. It is a simple backup system to dupe a folder from your hard drive to the Drobo. It is fairly rudimentary, but rudimentary backups are better than none. Personally I use Apple's own Backup.app to automatically backup my iCal and Address Book information to my Drobo every day, in case it gets corrupted using MobileMe syncing. You can use Apple's Backup app even if you don't use Mobile Me.
