Email messages, Lights and Mixed Messages

Forum History Drobo B800i (DroboElite)
1

Hoping for some knowledgeable help from you guys,

My Drobo B800i is sending mixed messages, worst than a girl who dates you just to get an EX jealous. Let me explain!

A while ago, before Christmas, everything was fine, all drives were displaying Green lights because Green is Good! It appeared everything was fine, then we started to receive weekly emails from her. The emails indicated Red Lights were happening on the unit (Critical Drobo Alert). This would normally be fine and indicate that I should pay more attention to her and replace a drive…then about 1 min or 2 min later, we would get another email indicating Yellow Lights (Drobo Warning). Letting us know, she was sorry but recovering and wouldn’t be flaky like every other girl. So clearly, we have a plan, in the morning, fully expecting to change out a drive. But…

We check the Drobo, and all lights are . . . Green Lights!!! That’s right, we believe a drive is going bad, we get indications a drive is going bad but then, we get the Green Lights across every drive…and cannot identify a the possibly bad drive. This pattern is now beginning to happen more often and almost daily occurrence.

Now just when we realize that Drobo is as fickle as the broken-hearted hottie, worse is her friend, DD. DD won’t give any useful information as to give any historical information of which drive it may be that could be failing.

You might blame me for mistreating my Drobo Hottie but I’ve given the latest firmware and even treated her to the newest DD version for her model. We’re ready to treat her with a new HDD, like the big spender I am. But I don’t and can’t find out which drive is causing the emails to indicate failing drive or drives.

If anyone can help me in the forums by shedding light on this, please help! Thank you wise guys of the Drobo Forum!

hopeless with Drobo,
Ronald

2

Dear Forum Readers,

After looking through just about every post in the forum about fickle teenage girl behavior exhibited by the 800i. I took a chance at turning off dual disk redundancy. I believe 800i doesn’t know exactly how to handle SMART errors/Physical error/File system errors differently (now don’t get me wrong…this is no real criticism of the device). So it handles them all by relayout.

I read another post, (I can’t remember where) that indicated “fickle” behavior by the hardware may be due to dual disk redundancy. So a day before my previous post, I turned off the dual disk redundancy, after one more set of Drobo emails indicating drive failure, I was able to go 2 days without any notification that the Drobo was angry. This leads me to believe that I may have some problem but doesn’t display itself in single failure recovery but only in dual disk recovery.

After not getting an email during the middle of the causing me to worry, this morning, I decided to return to dual disk redundancy and immediately received two emails same as previously described in the earlier post. This is now the Drobo rebuilding the array but with dual disk redundancy. (I should have waited until Friday sigh) According to my fickle teenage Drobo, She’ll fix things in about 135 hrs from now).

I’m still trying to figure how to identify a possible failed drive when all the lights are green and never leaves a light trail that indicates which drive fails in my situation

Hapless with Drobo 800i,
Ronald

3

Dear Diary,

My Drobo’s fickle nature is back with full fury! She has started the protection process three times in the past 24 hrs. She won’t tell me why she’s so unhappy. Her BFF, DroboDashboard still can’t tell me which disk(s) are causing the issue. In this relationship, I’m not sure even Dr. Phil can help.

On this 3rd time, right at 07:18 EST, she started the again, this time 256 hrs before the process can relayout with dual disk redundancy. All drives are now blinking yellow in the process. I can access her data but I cannot tell which drive is the one that is driving her crazy. If anyone knows the magic combination to get Drobo to tell me which drive…please help!

helpless with Drobo 800i,
Ronald