Drobo Suddenly Appears Full

Forum History Drobo
1

Hi guys,

I’ve just finished hoovering in the office and noticed that my Drobo V2 had a red light on the bottom disc bay. I also received an email saying that a critical situation was in progress. According to my Drobo Dashboard, my Drobo has only 3.36MB free space left and tells me:

“Drobo is critically low on capacity. Insert a new hard drive into the empty bay indicated by the red light”

What is happening here? Has this drive just died or is something else up? I had plenty of free space before so can’t for the life of me work out whether the disk is dead or there has been some sort of catalog corruption or other to make the machine misreport.

I currently have four drives in my Drobo, all 1TB disks.

I have checked that I am running the latest Dashboard and Firmware and have also run Disk Repair using Disk Utility. This has found no problems.

Any insight would be much appreciated,

Many thanks,

Tony

2

yes, it looks like the drive flagged in red has died, or at least is not responding to drobo, which means that it wants you replace it with a new drive

the reason for the low space error message is probably because you’ve just had whatever the capacity of that drive is, removed from your storage pool.

if in doubt take a log off your drobo and send it to support and ask them to look at it

3

I just popped out the offending drive and put it back in to see if the Drobo reported things the same. After a moment it started data protection mode and is rebuilding. 60hrs to go. Does that suggest that the drive is in fact ok and the problem was a reporting error?

4

sometimes drives hang for a few seconds, or take longer to respond than they should, drobo may have thought it had been removed

or perhaps the connection was a little loose and reseating it did the trick.

eitherway just let it finish rebuilding and you should be fine :slight_smile:

5

Thanks very much. I had just hoovered around the front of the drobo, with the door off to remove dust buildup. Perhaps I nudged something. Thanks so much for your input though. Very reassuring to have another set of ‘eyes’ on the issue.

6

Interesting : on my own Drobo, unplugging/replugging the FW800 cable also made the bottom disk disappear (red light, Drobo Dashboard seeing only the 3 topmost disks). Then extracting it then putting it back + power off/on forced a (llloooonnnnngggggg…) rebuild.
The fact that the cables are a the bottom of the Drobo and the disappearing disk the bottom one may be significant.
I opened a support case, and they finally exchanged my Drobo.
You probably should get a Log and have Data Robotics support check it.

7

Well the main question is, when the drive light was red, was it solid red or blinking red?

Blinking red indicates a failed drive.