Do I have to wait until the "Data Protection" message goes away?

Drobo - End of Sale Drobo FS
1

I just had a hard drive failure. I have 5 x 2TB WD EARS drives. I shut my FS down, ejected the faulty drive and re-seated it. I started my FS back up and the drive was reported as failing again. I again shut down my FS and ejected the failed drive. I restarted my FS and I’m receiving the “Data Protection in Progress” message with an approximate wait time of 7 hours. My question is do I have to wait until the “Data Protection” message goes away before I can insert a new drive?

As an aside, this is a bummer as these drives are less than a week old. Guess I’ll have to do a return with Newegg.com.

Thanx in advance.

2

I’m not 100% sure what adding a drive while a rebuild is in progress would do, but I would like to know the answer too? I suspect you can add a new drive but should never take one out during a rebuild. If you were hot swapping a drive, then you would be inserting it after it started rebuilding and since they recommend turning off during a swap but don’t say it’s required to power off, then you might be ok.

Take a look at this post: http://www.drobospace.com/forums/showthread.php?tid=1047&pid=7761#pid7761
docchris says it should be ok and Jennifer says that you can insert a new drive will the lights are blinking Amber and Green.

Also, i wanted to reply was to tell you that I had a similar issue when I swapped a drive…at showed up as failed so I pulled it and reinserted it again and it showed as failed so I ran the Hitachi tools/scan on the disk and it came back as good. I reinserted it again and it was fine and I haven’t had any issues since. I suspected that since my drives seem to not not go smoothly into the enclosure that it just didn’t seat perfectly and was reporting as a failed drive instead.

I think running the disk diagnostics will be much easier and faster than returning to newegg immediately.

3

I might do a test on the drive tomorrow.

The only thing with this drive is before my FS flagged it as bad, a “chirping” noise could be heard coming from my FS. Once I pulled the drive, no more “chirping.”

4

I’ve had mixed luck with disk diagnostics… Generally they only tell you if a drive has already gone bad (spare sectors are exhausted), but don’t tell you if a drive is going bad (spare sectors are rapidly decreasing).

If you can exchange the drive without much hassle, I would, just to be safe, but it’s really your choice.

Sometimes the manufacturer requires an error code from the diagnostics (in other words, they won’t replace a “going” bad drive, but will replace an already-bad drive) - all depends.