Dealing with Drobo (best practices?)

Question

I have two second generation Data Robotics Drobos, and have been using them under 10.6 on a MacBook via USB. Like many Drobo users, I have had various "issues" over the years, and even suffered 1TB of data loss probably related to the USB eject bug that was in Mac OS X 10.6.5-10.6.7. I have also used the Drobos on a Mac with FireWire.
My Drobos are set up as 1TB volumes, so my 4x2TB unit shows six 1TB volumes. Using DiskWarrior on some of my volumes has reported "speed reduced by disk malfunction" and DW was unable to rebuild the directory. I fear for my data, so I have been in the process of moving data away from the drive and starting fresh.
I would like to use this discussion to see what "best practices' others have come up with when dealing with a Drobo on a Mac.
When I first set up the Drobo, the documentation stated that the unit would take longer to startup if using one big partition, so I chose the smallest value -- 1TB. This initially gave me a few Drobo volumes to use, and as I swapped in larger hard drives, Drobo would start adding more 1TB volumes. I like this approach, since it lets me unmount volumes I am not using (so iMovie does not have to find every single "iMovie Events" I have across 12TB of drives).
This was also a good way to protect my data. When my directory structure crashed, and was unrepairable, I only lost 1TB of data. Had that happened on a "big" volume Drobo, I would have lost everything.
Data Robotics own KB articles will tell you to never use Disk Utility to partition a Drobo, but other KB articles say this is what you must do to use TimeMachine... Er? And, under 10.7, they now say don't do that, even for TimeMachine. Apparently, if your parititoned under 10.6 or earlier, you can still use your TimeMachine backup under 10.7, but if you are 10.7 only, you have to use some Time Tamer utility and create a sparsebundle image -- and then you cannot browse TimeMachine backups (what good is that, then?).
It's a mess.
So I am looking for guidance, tips, suggestions, and encouragement. I will soon be resetting one of my Drobos and starting fresh, then after I get everything working again, I will move all my data over to it, and reset my second Drobo.

Answer 1

I have been trying to do either.
right now i have the images download when the cell is created and then stored into an NSMutable Array. the array is initially populated with a NSString value of the url to the image. I then test to see if the object at the current TableView index is a UIIimage, If not i download the image and replace the existing NSString with the UIImage in the array.
-(UIImage*) newUIImageWithURLString:(int)urlString
if (![[imgarr objectAtIndex:urlString] isKindOfClass: [UIImage class]])
NSLog(@"image not there");
UIImage *img2get = [[UIImage alloc] initWithData:[NSData dataWithContentsOfURL:[NSURL URLWithString:[imgarr objectAtIndex:urlString]]]];
[imgarr replaceObjectAtIndex:urlString withObject:img2get];
[img2get release];
return [imgarr objectAtIndex:urlString];
Works fairly well but does stall the scrolling when i download the image because i am calling it like this in the cellForRowAtIndexPath.
UIImage *cellimage = [self newUIImageWithURLString:indexPath.row];
cell.image = cellimage;
I am looking into using a background process for the actual downloading so as not to interfere with the table operations. have you any thoughts on the best way to this?