We were recently contacted by a customer who lost data after using iPartition on a Drobo unit. Having reviewed the information on the Drobo website, we believe iPartition is probably incompatible with Drobo.

The reason for the incompatibility is that it looks as if Drobo is using knowledge of the Mac and PC filesystems that it supports to optimise data storage on its disks. That, coupled with the fact that Drobo is able to lie about the amount of space available on the disk (“Thin Provisioning”), means that there is a significant risk of problems if you attempt to use repartitioning software on a Drobo unit.

We have contacted Data Robotics, Inc., the manufacturers of Drobo, and if possible we would very much like to work with them to resolve this issue.

In the meantime, we strongly advise customers not to use iPartition on Drobo units.