4 Green lights 1 yellow - Now 4 Red, 1 Yellow?

Drobo - End of Sale Drobo S
1

Hi there,

I’ve never had to come onto the forum before as i’ve never had problems with all my Drobos (4bay Gen 2, and 5bay Gen 2) but today I need some help from you guys.

I had 5x 3TB drives (3 Hitatchi, 2 WD Red) and I had one yellow light. I wanted one of the WD Red drives for another project i’m working on, so I wanted to temporarily put in another Hitachi 3TB drive in for now to replace the WD drive until I could go out next week and buy a 4TB drive to remove the yellow light. I was thinking that removing a 3TB and putting in another 3TB for now should be okay and still leave me one yellow light and 4 green lights. Now to take responsibility for my actions on this next step, I did replace the bottom drive not the top drive which had the yellow light beside it by accident. Just wanted to put that out there first.

I walked away to go make some lunch, and the next thing I knew, the top 4 drives were all Solid Red, and the bottom new blank 3TB Hitachi drive I put in, now turned solid yellow. All the blue lights are solid blue, the hard drive read indicator light on the bottom right is solid green like it’s constantly reading but no flashing yellow/green rebuild lights are happening. I’ve never had a problem replacing drives in 3 years of owning Drobo products.

It has now been solid 4 red lights and solid 1 yellow light for about 4 hours and still no change in the lights.

Dashboard isn’t recognizing the drobo anymore, can not detect it. OSX can not see the drobo, so I can not get any data off of the unit.

Setup:
2009 8core Mac pro
32gigs ram
ATI 5870 Graphics Card
OWC USB 3.0 & eSata PCIe Card
OSX Mavericks 10.9.3

I’ve been running the Drobo S via USB 3.0 with out any problems.

Can anyone offer some advice?

  1. Should I replace the yellow drive that I just put in with another 3TB drive (maybe the new drive I put in is faulty?)

  2. Should I just leave it with the 4 solid red lights and 1 solid yellow light over night and see if it gets any better?

  3. Should I turn the power off and turn it back on again to see if it will start rebuilding again?

  4. Any other options that maybe i’m missing that could help?

Thanks a lot for your time in advance.

Cheers

** UPDATE **
Talked to Rodney with Tech Support and after showing him the image of the Drobo and explaining the whole situation, we got it all resolved. It turns out I was paranoid and really just needed to turn off the unit and restart it back up with the old hard drive back in it again. The on/off switch wasn’t working (Guessing the unit was frozen) so we unplugged it, re seated the old drive, re seated all the other drives as a double check precaution, then plugged the unit back in and powers her up. All is working once again.