It was nearing capacity so replaced a 500Gb HD with a 1Tb HD. The relayout process began, ran overnight and the following day I lost the ability to access the Drobo. I rebooted my Mac and the drobo restarted. Upon restart the Drobo came up with 4 RED lights (1 blinking - indicating a failed drive) - not the HD I added though, one of the existing drives prior to adding the new disk.
So it appears that during the relayout one of the pre-existing drives failed. I have a case open with support but that process is fairly casual in the sense that this is high priority to me and slower priority to Drobo - I did get a call today and tried a few suggestions - no luck yet.
I am wondering if this is recoverable? Or will I spend the next week with support/email to end up nowhere? Anyone have any experience with this. It seems that Drobos should come in 2 paks, one for using and 1 to backup the one you are using.
Given that you have a v2, you only have single-disk redundancy.
On the Pro, S, and newer you have the option of using dual disk redundancy, which would protect from your situation (as long as only one drive was initially removed).
Of course that doesn’t help… Definitely call support. Email tickets are generally higher-volume and lower priority. If it’s critical, best to call.
Still trying to teach my wife this… she likes to text me for decisions while she’s at the store, etc. Problem is, my signal at work sucks so I often get delays of 30+ minutes on texts.
I would be very interested in hearing details on your case. I had the exact same thing happen and, to date, my data has not been available.
Here’s my tale…
Bought a Drobo v2 in March, 2010. Installed four 1.5 TB drives. Everything was working perfectly until I decided to add storage by swapping out a 1.5 TB drive for a 2 TB. After 24 hours the Drobo kept restarting. A very helpful agent with Data Robotics customer support told me that was a sign that the Drobo had a bad drive. He was then able to determine that one of the drives had gone bad (not the one that had been replaced) in the middle of the rebuild.
I removed the bad drive and tried putting it in an internal bay on my computer. It wasn’t recognized. I then bought an external dock connector that was able to see the drive but the drive reported it was 2.2 TB in size rather than the actual 1.5 TB. I then cloned the drive bit-by-bit using Data Rescue and scanned the DMG. The hope was that Data Rescue would have caught the size discrepancy and corrected it so that I could then clone back to a 1.5 TB drive and reinsert into my Drobo. Unfortunately that didn’t work.
This is where I currently stand – no access to my data, an eight-month-old 1.5 TB WD hard drive that supposedly went bad with fairly light use and a lot of time spent trying to resolve the issue.