I’ve mentioned a few times here that I’ve spent roughly the last five years ripping all of our DVDs and other media to the server here at Casa Baud Attitude.  It all gets stored on a Drobo and backed up to some random external drives.

Apart from being kind of slow, I haven’t had any real complaints about the Drobo – none, that is, until quite recently.

I’ve got four 3 TB drives in the thing.  I lose the capacity of one drive to striping, so that’s 9 TB left.  The inability of engineers and hard drive manufacturers to agree whether a terabyte is a power of 2 or a power of 10 means that the Drobo software reports that I have about 8.3TB of total space.

I’ve used a hair over 7 TB.  If I open the Drobo dashboard, it cheerfully tells me that I have 1.14TB of free space.

That’s a lot of space by any reasonable measure.

HOWEVER, this is less than 15% of the total capacity, which means that there is now an annoying yellow warning light on the front of the dang thing and I get regular pop-up warnings alerting me to my low space issue.

Normally I would solve the first problem with a 2″ strip of electrical tape, and hang the consequences, if it weren’t for the fact that this is ALSO the light that will turn red should one of the drives start to fail.

And it wouldn’t stop the pop-ups, anyway.

I’m going to leave this post as a placeholder for now.  If I come up with a solution, I’ll add it later.