I have a Drobo5N. It is filled with 5x 2TB drives. One of them sounds like it is on the verge of failing. Thus far, I am unable to isolate which drive the sound is emanating from. The Drobo Dashboard reports all the drives as good. Now, I could wait until the drive actually fails, but I am getting a bit tired of the noise.
Any suggestions / thoughts on isolating the bad drive? (It seems I am in need of a stethoscope.)
You could shut Drobo off, then pull each drive and connect it to another computer to see which is making all the noise.
just as a thought…would a sata drive spin up if only the power adapter was plugged into it?
(if so, that could be a safer way to test the drive in terms of no actual data being potentially changed, to see if a particular one is making the noise like dragon mentions)
yes…you can power up a drive without the data cable attached.
cool, thanks dragon for the confirmation
I have a similar situation with a 5D. I was thinking about pulling one drive at a time and letting it run with 4 until I figure out which one is making noise. Can I do that?
hi ejoner,
you might trigger some rebuilds if you do that,
but instead, and if you can, it might be better to power your drobo off completely (with power cable unplugged)
and then to simply remove a drive (and to try powering that removed drive with just a sata power cable in another system or caddy case with just the power cable, and checking the spinning noise that way)
then if the drive sounds ok,
you can simply put it back into the powered off drobo, and then try the same test on the next removed drive, and so on.
the key will be to only remove or put a drive in, when power is all OFF on the drobo.