USB drive limitations with Drobo?

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I've just purchased an Asus RT-AC66U router and I installed firmware 374.43 (Merlin build). I plugged in a Drobo device and it recognized the device (yay!) but could not mount the driver (boo). The device is formatted with a HFS+ filesystem which I suspect may be the problem, but before I go through and try to reformat the Drobo I thought I'd check in here to confirm my suspicions.
Has anyone used Merlin's firmware to successfully mount a Drobo drive?

 

[Yannzola]

Currently using a Drobo with 374.43.2

No prob mounting a 16TB NTFS Drobo (3rd gen) via usb3. HOWEVER Mounting fails (in fact freezes the router) with any firmware past 374.43.2. Hoping this gets addressed in a future release.... but doubtful since my previous post regarding this issue had no traction.

 

[RMerlin]

No prob mounting a 16TB NTFS Drobo (3rd gen) via usb3. HOWEVER Mounting fails (in fact freezes the router) with any firmware past 374.43.2. Hoping this gets addressed in a future release.... but doubtful since my previous post regarding this issue had no traction.

NTFS driver is closed source, so outside of my control.

 

[Rankdropper84]

What exactly is a drobo? Can't you just run it off of one of the Ethernet ports and use samba or ftp to access the files off it?

FWIW I can run two separate Seagate 5TB external drives off my AC68U and it does so without a hiccup.

I look forward to a reply

 

[howarddavidp@gmail.com]

I have a Drobo Gen 3 (DDR3A21) and I got it to work as follows:

I used 4 x 2TB drives, so my available space was slightly less than 6TB after RAID, but I rounded down to avoid Thin Provisioning to 5TB.

I then used a Windows 10 PC and EXTFS from Paragon software to be able to read an EXT3 volume on Windows (it's freeware).

Then I used Acronis Disk Director 12 to make and format a EXT3 Primary Partition on the Drobo. It shows as 16TB, but I ignored the extra space and went for the safe 5TB partition.

I then plugged this into my ASUS AC68U (AC1900) USB3 port, but I found more stability on the USB2 port (this also happened with regular HDD's). I have been stable for 2 weeks now and I copied 1.5TB thus far to the Drobo. The ASUS calls the device "DROBO" and makes the drive available as "sda2".

I will update in a month or 2.

David