Bad Drobo bay?

Forum History Drobo
1

So, I bought the 3rd gen Drobo last year. Everything was fine until last month when I went on vacation and shut everything down. When I came back, and powered up the Drobo, it went wacky and finally told me the drive in the bottom bay was bad. Fine. I sent it back to the manufacturer and just got a replacement yesterday. I put the replacement in the bay and Drobo was happy. This morning I come in to find that there were all kinds of messages from the Drobo, and that drive in that bay is bad again! Really???

2

I contacted Drobo support and the answer i got?

Buy a new one!!! It’s not even a year old!

3

hi,
it might be that the same bay is actually bad, (and there are a few ways to test that) but it could also be that the drive they sent you was bad in some way too, such as a refurbished drive or something.

what would be good to do when you have some time would be this:

  1. to double check with support as depending on where you are, you might still have warranty. usually its 12months but can vary from place to place, and maybe if your call got routed through a particular method the country might have not been brought up correctly etc

  2. to try some surface scan tools on the replacement sata drive that they sent you, maybe even the western digital data lifeguard util wdutil and smart status checks etc, just in case.

  3. to test that bay further with a drive from another bay that still works BUT…
    the drobo would have to be powered down first, then drive moved to that bay, and then powered up.
    also, depending on which mode of protection you have, such as SDR or DDR, you might want to make a verified backup of your data first, just to play safe.

(you could try using that seemingly-faulty replacement drive for your backup, if you do not have any others available, especially if it passes the surface tests on that drive, but if there is another type of problem on it, it might be better to wait until you are happy that you have enough backups of your data before trying the bay swaps etc.

btw can you remember what sort of messages the drobo or dashboard was saying?