Changing a failed drive while Drobo is performing Data Protection

Drobo - End of Sale Drobo FS
1

Hello,

I’ve done a search on the forums and looked back a ways to find an answer to my specific situation, but couldn’t not find one. Hopefully someone can answer my question.

I have a DroboFS, Firmware version 1.2.4, and Drobo Dashboard 2.1.2 (OS X) with four (4) 2TB drives in bays 1-4. On Saturday the drive in bay 2 began to blink red and Drobo Dashboard notified me that the drive had failed. My available space fell to 1% (~40GB), and the other drive bay lights remained solid green.

On Sunday I deleted some data from the Drobo to free up some space while I waited to get a replacement drive. I didn’t have as much data I wanted to delete as I thought and only freed up about 40GB, bringing my free space to 2% (~80GB). This morning I awake to find the once green lights in bays 1,3 and 4 blinking yellow/green and Drobo Dashboard is telling me Data Protection is in progress and should be completed in approx. 30 hours.

I’ve gone out and bought a new 3TB drive to replace the failed drive with.

My question is this: should I replace the drive now or wait for the data protection to be completed before replacing the failed drive?

Thank you for any answers/help you can provide.

2

While you can remove a failed (blinking red) drive at any time, I recommend waiting until data protection is re-established.

Why? It’s possible in the remove and replacement of the failed drive that you might knock out one of the other drives, and that will cause the loss of the disk pack. So I would simply avoid the risk entirely.

3

Thank you for the advice.

I’ve followed it and waited for the long data protection process to complete.

I replaced my old 2TB WD Green drive with a new 3TB WD Red (supposedly specially made for use in NAS boxes).

Luckily the old WD Green drive is under warranty still and I am in the process of RMAing it.

Thanks again :smiley:

4

You’re very welcome! As a geek, I know it’s tough to obey “hands off!” :wink:

5

(i also would let it do something before doing something else)

having said that though, it would make sense for the drobo to be able to “recover” from a possible loss of disk pack, in case another drive got knocked loose as docchris mentioned above. eg it should not simply allow the loss of a disk pack, it should be programmed to give a message like too many drives removed or something, so that you could simply push a loose drive back in and for the drobo to recognise it again and continue.

6

Brandon, you are basically suggesting that in any case where a drive fails but Drobo starts compacting the array into the remaining drives, that it is better to let that process complete, and then replace failed drive.

I guess you are avoiding one potential problem (physically moving another drive such that the array comes tumbling down). But you then risk the stress of doing that compaction, with furious non-redundant activity for 10-20-60 hours or whatever.

I thought “we all” (including you?) had more or less come to a consensus that it was better to get the drive replaced ASAP to try to avoid that compaction process.

P.S. we recently had a discussion about what the Drobo does after a drive fails, in the two cases where there 1) is OR 2) is not enough space available to shrink the array. I think we have our answer here, for both cases :slight_smile:

P.P.S I could make a counterargument to my argument, suggesting that either method may result in equally long and equally stressful and unprotected/non-redundant processing. Could in itself make for an interesting discussion.

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(i think all of our threads usually make for “interesting discussions” :slight_smile:

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Paul, I’m waiting for someone to take the bait I hung out on that P.P.S. :). The more I think about it the less sure i am of the answer.

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[quote=“NeilR, post:6, topic:41880”]
Brandon, you are basically suggesting that in any case where a drive fails but Drobo starts compacting the array into the remaining drives, that it is better to let that process complete, and then replace failed drive.[/quote]
While I do know Drobo goes into the “too many drives removed” suspended state (solid red), personally I still feel much better avoiding that, and any possible mishap that might occur there.

Once the drive is marked failed Drobo doesn’t touch it anymore, so more than likely some compaction has already occurred, unless you caught the failed drive immediately.

Dunno, there are argument for both sides. For me, the solid red is scary, so I rather avoid it. :slight_smile:

In the scenario of the already-compacted array, it’s a drive/capacity addition which is generally quick and Drobo does the optimization behind the scenes.

I’m not sure what the behavior is if the replacement drive fails during relayout, assuming it gets used as a true replacement to begin with, rather than finishing the compaction to the other drives anyway, then adding the new drive.

No, I’m not in a position to test that. :slight_smile:

10

My guess is that when the failed drive is replaced, the compaction is immediately halted and the remaining un-compacted data on the failed drive is replicated to the replacement. That is the logical thing to do because if the compaction continued anyway, the entire drive would have to laid out again (but in protected background mode) after the compaction. That makes no sense (from my end user point of view).

Assuming that compaction stops with the replacement, a compaction is probably more stressful to the remaining and very critical drives because they are not just being read in order to reconstruct parity and data zones. They are being totally re-written. And a compaction probably takes more time, assuming reads are faster than writes.

And even if the read and write rates are identical, a compaction requires all data on all remaining drives to be read and written, instead of just read in order to compute the zones on the replacement drive.

I don’t have any opinion either regarding what happens if the replacement drive fails. We would hope that that is recoverable, and that is probably the most likely disk to fail, assuming there is more early failure than more or less random failure on seasoned drives.

The reason for my P.P.S. is that, regardless of how it goes about it, and regardless of when you replace the drive, a full relay will result and during that time, depending on what we just discussed, any drive failure could kill the array (assuming single disk redundancy).

However, if you leave the compaction running, intentionally waiting for it to complete before replacing the drive, then any further disk failure is guaranteed to fail the array, and it is guaranteed to take the maximum possible time to complete (longest windows of vulnerability).

If you replace the drive ASAP then it is possible that at least a failure of the replacement drive is recoverable, and there may be less stress on the surviving drives (if the replaced drive is indeed just rebuilt rather than the entire array rewritten in some complicated way).

I don’t see any possible advantage to leaving it to compact, except the slim chance that you might knock another drive loose AND the Drobo does not allow you to recover from that. I think that likelihood is less than all the other possible benefits of quick replacement that would likely reduce all the other risks.

The worst case scenario for ASAP replacement is that despite the replacement, the compaction goes on just as if the drive were not replaced, resulting in no possible benefit to ASAP replacement. Leaving a slight additional risk added by the physical hot swap. But I think that is a very unlikely outcome.

Not well defined probabilities but I find it difficult to concoct likely statistical outcomes in favor of letting it compact. Greater minds might well come up with one :slight_smile:

11

Hmm, now that you’ve made that argument, you are definitely allaying some of my “all red” heart attack fears, hehe.
Though to tell the truth, I’ve been lucky and haven’t had to replace a drive in a number of years. :smiley: knocks on lots of wood

BeyondRAID is sneaky, sometimes in good ways, other times in bad ways. :slight_smile:

12

Wherever possible, apply Occam’s Razor.

It wants a drive… feed it a drive :slight_smile:

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15

I have the same issue and query, I know this is an old topic.

I recently noticed in the Dashboard it states “Data protection enabled, you may continue to access your data but do not remove any drives with the yellow and green blinking light”

Along with the “replace the faulty drive” notification.

Does this mean you CAN actually remove the red flashing one so long as you dont remove the yellow and green blinking ones?

Waiting 40 hours for a data rebuild is a fair amount of time… I’ve got like 600gb free out of the 4x 3TB drives with one of those as a redundancy. (5th bay in the FS is empty)

EDIT: Well I pulled it out anyway and put a new replacement in, its gone from 40 hours to 10 for data protection. It didnt pop up any warnings of sorts and its continuing on with Data protection now as it was before but with less time to rebuild itself.

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I know it’s a long time since the question was asked but it’s an important one and it might help someone else.

Absolutely, yes. That’s exactly what it means.

That’s pretty full. I try to stay below 80%. Add a drive to that empty bay.

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