In May 2022, I bought a used Drobo Pro on eBay for $175 and four 8 TB drives to put into it. I’ve own two other drobos in the past and really liked them. The company wasn’t actively selling hardware at the time and they were saying online that it was due to supply chain issues. I fully expected the company to survive, though. The following January, the company eliminate their support staff and in April 2023, the company filed for Chapter 7 bankruptcy. I didn’t realize any of that at the time. I had my trusty drobo connected to a Dell Optiplex MFF and it was chugging along fine.

Earlier this year, knowing that Microsoft wouldn’t allow the Optiplex 9020 to get Windows 11, I started thinking about how I would eventually replace it. In February, I bought an HP Z4 G4 for LLM experiments. The logical thing to do would be to install Drobo Dashboard on it. Since I want to be able to administer it remotely, and neither Parsec nor Chrome Remote Desktop works on Ubuntu, I installed a Windows 11 VM on it (using VMWare Workstation Pro), hunted down a copy of the latest Windows Drobo Dashboard software, and installed it on the VM. Of course, I couldn’t get it to work, and then the VM stopped working correctly.

With the support forums (along with the rest of the Drobo website) gone, figuring out why it’s not working and what to do next has been a struggle. I’m damn tempted just to throw four 12 GB drives in the Z4 G4, set up a raid array, and call it a day.

Do you have a suggestion? Please feel free to drop a comment below.

https://jws.news/2024/life-with-a-drobo-after-bankruptcy-is-weird/

#Drobo #Ubuntu #Windows