Adding a Drobo volume?

[tomsliwowski]

So I'm thinking of picking up a used Drobo Pro (DRPR1-A) for like $250 from a guy on Facebook. Now I'm fairly sure this thing is limited to volumes of 16GB in size which isn't a big deal if I can use DrivePool on my Server 2016 box to combine a couple of volumes into one pool. Is something like this supported? Keep in mind this would be my first Drobo anything (they were always WAY out of my price range for what they are) so please excuse my ignorance in case this whole thing is a ludicrous idea.

Thanks!

[Christopher (Drashna)]

You could.

But it's not really ideal for that.  Specifically, it's an "iSCSI" device.  So the drive or drives show up like a physical disk, and can be added to the pool. 

But it's a bit more of a complicated setup. 

[tomsliwowski]

40 minutes ago, Christopher (Drashna) said:

You could.

But it's not really ideal for that.  Specifically, it's an "iSCSI" device.  So the drive or drives show up like a physical disk, and can be added to the pool. 

But it's a bit more of a complicated setup. 

I'm looking to have some sort of parity and redundancy that the Drobo provides (I'm kind of wary of running my deathwish drive pool).

The goal is that at some point, my entire pool will be just made up of individual Drobo iSCSI volumes.

If you have a simpler and financially equivalent solution I'm more than happy to hear it.

[Christopher (Drashna)]

32 minutes ago, tomsliwowski said:

The goal is that at some point, my entire pool will be just made up of individual Drobo iSCSI volumes.

That's not a horrible idea, actually.  Just keep in mind that you'll be sharing a gigabit network connection, so you're splitting 125MB/s throughput. 

33 minutes ago, tomsliwowski said:

If you have a simpler and financially equivalent solution I'm more than happy to hear it.

iSCSI capable devices are generally very expensive, since they're business and enterprise grade. 

So ... unfortunately, it's really "RIP wallet" to do something like this.