Yesterday, one on my Drobo units warned me that it was running short of space. This is hardly surprising given the amount of video production I have been doing recently.

I opened the Drobo dashboard software and checked the drives. The software showed me the unit had 2 x 2TB and 2 x 1.5TB disks installed. It also indicated I should replace one of the 1.5TB disks with a larger capacity volume, highlighting it amber. The replacement drive I ordered from Amazon was 3TB and cost only £74 including delivery.

Today the drive arrived, I Popped the magnetic cover off the Drobo, ejected the recommended disk and inserted the replacement. It took me around 30 seconds to swap the disks and I didn’t even need to turn the unit off. The Drobo dash then popped up a few messages before turning on data protection mode. This is where the content of the Drobo is spread across all the installed drives in case one ever fails. As for the 1.5TB drive, I popped that into my other Drobo unit which had 2 x 4TB, 1 x 1TB and 1 x 500GB disks.

What I find great is, even though the Drobo is busy protecting the data on the disks, I can still use it just as I would normally. In fact, I just finished editing another video lesson, saving it to the Drobo.

This is how technology should work.