I’m running an Intel based Mac Pro (10.6.2) with the latest Drobo Dashboard and DroboPro firmware.
My device was causing all sorts of kernel panics when plugged in via iSCSI which I eventually was able to minimize. However, since the latest Dashboard update, I’ve noticed that after 24-36 hours my Mac Pro becomes sluggish and unusable. The mouse stutters, skips,etc. and the keyboard input is delayed and error prone (keystrokes missing). A reboot solves this for another 24-36 hours.
However, when I unplug the DroboPro (which is connected via dedicated gigabit ethernet) the lag issues disappears.
Is there a memory leak or some sort of performance issue with DD and iSCSI on the Mac? Anyone else experiencing this? Makes the computer unusable when DroboPro is connected and if I didn’t want the iSCSI connection I would have spent the money buying a DroboPro.
Very frustrated with Drobo products these days (I own three regular Drobos as well).
I have experienced similar behavior on my Mac Mini Server connected via iSCSI but thought it was attributed to my wireless connection to my Airport Extreme base station. I turned off wireless, connected wired and changed the DroboPro to FW800 and the symptoms went away. However, maybe the reason I resolved it was switching the DroboPro to FW800 as you suggest. The main symptoms I experienced were a jumpy mouse cursor and stuttering video when recording via EyeTV over the network from an HDHomerun unit after ~24 hours and a reboot seemed to temporary clear it.
We have noticed similar issues with our Drobo Pro on our G5 with iSCSI - after leaving the computer on for extended periods of time (generally over night) the mouse starts skipping. The computer is running solidly otherwise. A reboot fixes this.
I’ll switch to FW800 to see if that makes any difference over night tonight.
I’ve since reverted to the earlier 1.5x version to see if this helps. There is another forum thread where Drobo is acknowledging this issue and asking people experiencing it to downgrade drobo dashboard.
The activitymonitord process on a Mac Pro running OSX 10.6.2 used a majority of the CPU cycles after 24 hours when using Drobo Dashboard 1.6.1. This resulted in a substantial performance reduction.
After upgrading to 1.6.6, this does not happen.
Upgrading to 1.6.6 caused a kernel panic on my machine and required a restart. Have nothing else open and save your work before upgrading.
As I say on our G5 (10.5.8) had stuttery mouse issues and now has had 4 kernal panics which the error reporter in OSX says is caused by the Data Robotoics iSCSI driver. Definitely some issues there. Am upgrading to 1.6.6 now but to keep the system stable the Drobo is now plugged in via FW800.
I have an iMac and a Mac Mini that I’ve used on OS X 10.6.2 on both Firewire and iSCSI, I get the same runaway process with activitymonitord going crazy after 24-48 hours (less if there is lots of disk traffic). Will try 1.6.6 and see what happens. Great forum. Thanks.