Drive Troubleshooting

This week I worked on solving some issues with the Drobo storage system that I work from. Mac OS was reporting that the device had several hundred GB of space available, but the Drobo software claimed only a few MB. After some research and investigation, I discovered that OS X only reports the total storage space of the device and does not account for the method in which the Drobo software stripes data across disks to provide redundancy. Therefore OS X was showing as free space what the Drobo was using for backup. The issue was resolved by transferring unneeded files to other external drives to free up space on the Drobo.