Drive replacement

Hi, I got some great advice on this forum a few months ago when one of the drives in my 5D failed and I upgraded two drives from3TB to 6TB so as to increase capacity.

The originals are all WD Red drives and I replaced them with WD Red drives. I bought two together and one of them arrived dead so I got a replacement and after 2 months this too has failed. Bad batch perhaps, so to replace the failed one I decided to get it from a different supplier (Western Digital direct) so as to try to get a different batch, manufacture dates are almost 12 months apart.

When I fit the latest drive the whole Drobo device powers off after a few minutes and then each time it restarts cuts off before completing a full boot up so I’m guessing yet another failed drive. When I put the drive that needs replacing back in, the device successfully boots it’s just that the app says the drive is failing, rebuilds data but stays powered on.

In over 30 years in the industry I’ve never seen drives arrive dead nor had any fail after such a short time. So I have a couple of questions if you could assist please.

1/ Could it be the Drobo device that has the issue, baring in mind the failing drives are in the top slot?
2/ Should I try a different manufacturer and if so are different makes compatible with WD Red?

Thanks in advance.

It might be because there are 2 WD Red drives now. The standard drives are ‘WD Red’ but are SMR drives - the others are classed as ‘WD Red Pro’ which are CMR. Importantly - Drobo does not support SMR Drives. Be careful what you purchase - here is the background:

Refer to Drobo’s current recommendations on the HDD types that it supports (and read the fine print too) when selecting your drives.