Hello,
I’ve contacted Drobo for support and have been told that the DroboFS is already unsupported and discontinued. Wow! It has only been about 2-3 years having the device and already its discontinued. I’m pretty sure more people have 10+ year old Windows XP systems with minimal hiccups for basic usage.
I understand it is normal for most high usage business appliances to be replaced after a short period of time, but I considered the DroboFS based off reviews to be a dedicated NAS and in hopes it would be a reliable backup/centralized file access for at least 5 years.
Recently, on a daily basis, the network of computers using the Drobo Dashboard loose connection to it.
Things known:
Drobo FS
-Two 1TB drives
-Latest firmware
-Static IP
-Drives not having issues or known what else to check then drive space and raid status
-Can be pinged fine during loss of connection but not accessible
All systems,
-On latest Dashboard version
-Running Windows 7 Pro with firewall/exceptions turned off to allow for access to Drobo
-All wired connections
-Using Drobo Dashboard with separate user accounts and managed shared folders
-Connected to separate UPS backups
Has anyone replaced drives by replacing each drive one at a time? (Remove one old drive, replace with new drive, wait for rebuild, then repeat for other drive)
Any suggestions are greatly appreciated.
Thank you.
hi, sorry i do not know much about the Networked models, but on my other drobo’s, Gen1 and Gen2, i have replaced existing drives with larger capacity ones, one at a time - eg waiting for rebuild.
if you only have 2 drives inside it, and if you still have free slots, it might be better to insert the 3rd drive in, and let it get added to the pool, rather than taking one out. (assuming you have a 3rd drive free etc)
if the problem only happened recently, one test you might be ablt to try would be to temporarily disable the firewall, (and internet if you want to play safe and possible), and to see if the same issue happens.
If it does, then it might be something else, possibly a network cable got damaged and maybe you can try to swap that as well?
once some causes are eliminated, then it will become easier to narrow down the culprit - (in theory at least)
Hi Paul,
Thanks for the reply. I will purchase a larger or same capacity drive and have it inserted into the Drobo (2 spaces available).
This issue has occurred I believe near the end of June. The odd thing is, if it was a bad network cable, it should be dropping packets when pinged. (Which it is not) It will not show the Drobo on the dashboard at all until it is power cycled, then it will resume as normal. I’ve downloaded the diagnostic logs after the past few times it has been noticed, but unable to determine the exact cause.
The firewall on the systems accessing the DroboFS are disabled for testing, but the issue still occurs.
Drobo support has recommended to have it connected directly to a system, but unfortunately it is in a working environment where taking it offline is not desired at this time.
I scanned the network to see if there has been any IP conflicts, but nothing. I will be rechecking that all the computers have the latest version of the dashboard if that may be causing an issue.
hi thanks for the info,
are you making notes of the date/time of the reboots and when it stops working?
(just in case theres a particular time range when the problem happens - eg, maybe a ups unit is kicking in or something else around that particular time)?
try and check which drives you can use with your firmware, as some drobo’s only support drives up to a particular capacity. (eg on the gen1 models it was 2TB max per drive)
maybe it’s not the network cable, but the router or hub instead?
and maybe the windows event logs could show some useful info, for around that time or leading up to the time of the problem?[hr]
btw it might be worth sticking a thermometer near the unit, to see if a particular temperature is causing it to overheat and cause the problems?
Hi, I guess I have a similar problem. My Drobo FS can’t be found by the Drobo Dashboard, and it also won’t mount manually using smb://(ip address here). I went through all steps suggested in KB 445, as they suggest, every single one, as carefully as I could. After that, when I contacted support, I was told they wouldn’t help because my device is not supported anymore, and that I should buy a new one to get support.
The device pings, 0% package loss, the lights all flash normally during power on and power off. Additionally I tried removing all drives (after power off, power cord unplugged), then boot up Drobo FS with no drives and still it would not show up in the dashboard.
Isn’t Drobo FS supposed to at least show up in the dashboard if we boot without any attached drive?
I have recently experienced a similar problem. Drobo FS is live on the network, has a valid IP address, but I can’t connect even though I can ping. Telnet, direct connect via cable, and Dashboard all fail. Drobo support said they won’t help because the unit is old - they suggested I move the media set to a new Drobo to see if I can recover data.
This is very disappointing. Has anyone been able to recover from this?
Yes, they really do want you to buy another one to reward them for not supporting your last one.
My B800fs was repeatedly rebooting. They said to buy service before they would even look at the logs. Price of service is more than a new unit costs them. I pulled the drives, checked SMART, and found two failing. Replaced them, all good. Thanks for nothing, Drobo. I moved it to a redundancy position. The QNAP that replaced it checks the SMART data itself.
Now my older DroboFS is having the symptoms everyone else here is seeing. Pings fine, no other response.
And today my B800fs is in the same state. All green lights, ping works, doesn’t appear in Dashboard, doesn’t appear on the network, won’t mount, can’t connect.
