Formatting Drives Using the Mac OS Disk Utility

While you can use Disk Utility to format the volumes on your Drobo storage device, you cannot change the size of the volume(s) or manage the volumes on your device (DroboPro and DroboElite only). Because of this, it is recommended that you use Drobo Dashboard to format volumes. The following instructions apply to formatting Drobo volumes using Disk Utility.

If your Mac detects your unformatted Drobo, the Disk Insertion dialog box will appear.
Click Initialize to launch the Disk Utility application. If the application does not appear, it can be started from Applications > Utilities > Disk Utility.
From the left panel, select 2.0 TB Drobo (Drobo connected via FireWire), 2.0 TB TRUSTED USB Mass Storage Media (Drobo connected via USB), or 2.0 TB DROBOPRO iSCSI TARGET Media (DroboPro connected via iSCSI).

Warning: Be sure to select 2.0 TB Drobo or 2.0 TB TRUSTED USB Mass Storage Media (the new drive), and not another drive that may contain data.

From the button bar (at the top of the right panel), select Erase.
From the Volume Format drop-down list, accept Mac OS Extended (Journaled) unless you have a specific need for a different option.
In the Name text box, type a name for your Drobo; for example, Drobo.

Click the Erase button to view the Erase warning message.

Click Erase to wipe any data and format the new drives in Drobo.
Drobo will complete the formatting job, and a Drobo drive icon will appear on your desktop and be ready for use.

Tip: Once Drobo has been formatted, you do not need to perform this format procedure again for any other drive you add or upsize in Drobo until you add enough capacity where the actual capacity is larger than the volume size. When that happens, follow the steps above to format the newly created volume. Any new capacity created by adding a new hard drive will be available within seconds.

Warning: The Erase command erases ALL data on all hard drives in Drobo.