Oli Kenobi

3 How I got a 16TB external HD

October 29th, 2009

I got some comments regarding yesterday’s Pic of the Day (Oct 28, 2009), and I guess I need to explain it.

Last month I bought a Drobo. It’s an external hard drive enclosure that can handle up to 4 drives, and 16TB. It has its own RAID-like technology: you can put any size of hard drive together, it will handle the rest and make sure your data is safe: if one drive fails, your data is still there.

I don’t really have 16TB total.

Yep, this post title is a little misleading, I know. Drobo can handle 4 disks of 4TB each. Disks that big don’t exist yet as far as I know. Right now, I have two 256GB drives in it. The OS sees one unique drive, and when you format it, you have to set the maximum capacity you want the Drobo to handle. I set it to the max, 16TB.

When the current drives will be almost full, Drobo will alert me, so I can add a new HD or replace one already there. It’s super easy to use, and definitely the best personal storage solution on the market right now.

Why does it show 17.59TB?

I don’t know.

3 comments

  • WhistleNovember 8th, 2009 at 3:26 am

    Normally, when you format a disk, the usable space will be determine by the partition format and will be less than the physical space total.
    But in this case it’s an interpretation of the TB:
    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Terabyte

    1 Terabyte = 1099511627776 Bytes

    If you multiply by 16, you get 17 592 186 044 416 bytes
    And we have your answer in this number

    For the interested, here is the Drobo calculator:
    http://www.drobo.com/resources/drobocalculator.php

  • oliNovember 8th, 2009 at 3:30 am

    Thanks for the info! I was just too lazy to search for it… :)
    I knew that usually the real available space is less than described, but I was surprised that this time it’s more…

  • WhistleNovember 8th, 2009 at 3:31 am

    I should have said

    1 Tebibyte = 1099511627776 Bytes

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