Hi guys,
It’s a long story, but, I have a question.
If I power down my Drobo, and pull the disks out of my disk pack, and individually plug them into a computer to check the SMART data, without writing changes to the disk, will this cause problems when I put the disk pack back into my Drobo?
Here’s the whole story:
I have a Drobo Gen2, and recently (after a few accidental disconnections because of a bad cable), my iTunes said my library was corrupted beyond repair. I decided to run a fsck in Disk Utility, during the night (while fsck was running), I closed my laptops lid without thinking. In the morning, i was greeted with the message that fsck had failed mid-way through (exactly when i put the machine to sleep, not surprisingly).
“Not to worry” i though, “I’ll just run fsck again”. I have a rather large drobo, 4x2TB drives, and about 3TB full, as a result fsck has always taken about 8 hours. After about 8 hours, I went back to my computer to be greeted with log messages stating how fsck had found errors, repaired, fscked again, found errors a second time, repaired, found errors a third time and failed to repair.
After that, my drive was not mountable, and fsck refused to touch it, even with fsck_hfs -rfd
At that point, in a panic, I bought diskwarrior, only for it to give me a memory warning, then something about the performance being reduced due to possible disk errors, then finally failing saying it was out of memory. (odd, because while it had used up all my active memory, I still had plenty of swap space)
I got on with DiskWarrior support, and the guy managed to get the disk mountable again using dd and some clever manual editing of my filesystem.
He claimed that it was a failing disk with bad blocks, I would be shocked that the Drobo didn’t pick this up if it’s true.
I suspect it isn’t though…
But, this is why I want to pull my disks out and check their smart status.
Since I am only using 3TB and I have 4 x 2TB hard drives, I can loose a drive, and still have enough free space left on the 3 to have redundancy after the relayout completes, as I understand it.
Thoughts?
Ideas?
Suggestions?