Drobo

Drobo 5D keeps rebooting itself

Direct Attached Products
#1

I have a Drobo 5D that keeps rebooting itself. One of the drives, an 8TB Seagate drive, started flashing that it needed to be replaced, so I ordered a replacement of the same size and model drive but when I replaced the drive the Drobo began rebooting itself. It stays running for only a minute or so before it reboots.

I have run through the suggestions in article AA-01649 “What should I do if my Drobo keeps rebooting?” and they did not solve the issue. I have also used article AA-01615 “How to validate the Drobo power supply” to validate that my power supply seems to be working correctly.

I followed the directions in this forum thread (After drive failure replacement, drobo keeps rebooting) and started the device up with just the four drives that had not failed. In that thread it caused a 4-drive rebuild and then the new drive was able to be added. Unfortunately for me it started and mounted and I was able to browse my directory structure for a couple minutes but then it rebooted the same as before. I tried the four drives without mounting and it also rebooted after a couple minutes.

This is bad, isn’t it? Do I have multiple simultaneous drive failures? Do I have any chance of recovering this data?

Drobo 8D Rebooting Itself Many Times
#2

Are these Seagate drives you are using Shingled Magnetic Recording (SMR) drives? If so, they are not compatible with most RAID-type devices due to how data is written. This includes Drobo.

#3

They are Seagate Barracuda drives, I’m not sure if they are SMR but that sounds like it could be the issue. I never heard about that problem.

I had one of these drives running in my array starting in late October though and everything seemed fine. It’s only when it seems to die in early March and I replaced it that this rebooting problem began.

If that was the issue, would that have messed up my entire drive array? Because now I don’t have either of those Seagate drives in my Drobo and it’s still rebooting on me.

#4

If it’s rebooting even without any drives present, could be an issue with the power adapter. Could you fins a compatible adapter to try?

#5

It doesn’t reboot itself with no drives present. I validated my power supply according to article AA-01615 and it seems OK.

#6

I’ve been distracted by other tasks but I circled back to this today. I followed the procedure to put the Drobo into Read Only mode with just the 4 good drives inserted and fingers crossed but it seems to be not rebooting itself anymore. The 4 drives have green lights and the empty slot has a red light but the array is working and readable and seems to not be rebooting itself.

I have had it running for about 20 minutes and I’ve begun to back up my data which will take a good long while but so far so good. I’m hopeful I’ll be able to get my data off and then I can try to rebuild the array from scratch.

#7

The Drobo is consistently unmounting itself from my Mac after 30-40 minutes of copying files, but it doesn’t reboot.The drive lights stay the same. Unplugging and replugging the USB doesn’t remount it or allow Dashboard to discover it so I have to shut it down when this happens. Then I can restart the array and it mounts again and I can copy files for another 30-40 minutes until another unmounting happens.

In theory I’ll be able to back up all my files but it’s going to take forever if I have to reboot the Drobo every 40 minutes. And I need to hope I don’t have a full drive failure in the meantime… Anyone have any ideas to prevent this unmounting from happening? I have the Drobo in read only mode and I am running Catalina.

#8

I purchased DroboHelp to get some assistance with this issue, I bought it a week ago and put my order number in the support ticket but nobody from Drobo is responding to me at all. I haven’t heard a word from them since they told me I was out of warranty and needed to buy DroboHelp.

Why did I pay $50 for support when nobody will support me? Is this a normal experience?

#9

I can’t answer your Drobo ticket experience, sorry.

From what I have read from your earlier posts, some queries:
Are you able to extract some logs from your computer and share the sequence up to the shutdown?
Also have you run a Disk Utility over the volume recently?
Have you also tried a replacement cable and alternate USB port?

#10

Finally managed to get support’s attention. They diagnosed it as a bad drive in the array which needs a block level clone made of it so I’m going to work on getting that done in the next few days.

#11

I cloned the bad drive and restarted in RO mode but things are if anything worse. Waiting on support to advise me.

The Drobo still dismounts itself every 30-40 minutes but now the rsyncs are throwing unpredictable readdir errors while I’m trying to keep backing up. Sometimes if I just run the rsync again it manages to read those failed directories and back them up, sometimes it finds them but only if I reboot the Drobo. Rarely I come across one that it won’t read no matter what and even the finder won’t read it.

Still running with just 4 drives since support wants to check my diagnostics before we decide on bringing it out of RO mode.

#12

Just wanted to follow up on this and give some closure. The backing up was hellish and took forever, I had to reboot the Drobo hundreds of times to be able to get all my data off it successfully. But all the failed rsyncs eventually succeeded with enough retries so I didn’t lose any significant data.

After I got the backup done I took Drobo out of RO mode and did a factory reset. Things seem fine now and I have been restoring data all through the night with no dismounts or freezes. I conclude that the reboots were being caused by my array being damaged and the factory reset and reformatting seems to have cleared things up.

#13

I’m glad you have retrieved your data. Quite an ordeal.
Keep that external backup copy of your data as well.