I had an older Drobo FS claim 3 different WD green and red drives were bad in quick successsion last week, and had to pull all three of them. This caused my FS to quickly tell me it didn’t have enough space for all my files. Since the FS is a backup of my 5N, I haven’t lost any data, but I am nervous that my backup unit has started to flake out. I did a reset of the FS to see if I could put the WD drives back in to see if they would “fail” again, but the FS still remembers the drives even after the reset.
My question is will a pinhole reset clear the drive memory of the FS so I can try my drives again? If not, is there a way to clear that data?
hi kcbass, a pinhole reset might do that, though usually the drobo tend to recognise failed drives as failed. (i think some other users also had to blank the drives as well)
but it might be a good idea to run some tests on those drives, via a standlone usb caddy (or a direct sata connection on another computer for example), just to be sure that there are no errors on the drives, as you might be trying to force it to use drives that are having some problems?
Good advice, thanks for that. I actually ran some low level tests on them over the weekend and then did a full reformat using a windows machine. After I’d reset the Drobo-FS, I re-seated the drives to see what it would do, and the bay went red before the drive even fully spun up, which leads me to think that it recognized the drive identity rather than checking for bad sectors and then failing it out again. I’ll try the pinhole reset and then see what happens.
Okay, so unfortunately, a pinhole reset did not erase the drive memory on the FS, so I now have 2x2TB and 1x3TB drives that I can no longer use in my FS. If anyone knows how else I might erase the drive memory I would really appreciate it. If the FS re-checks the drives and again determines they’re bad, I think that’s fair, but I would like to force the FS to check them again instead of just throwing them out based on a database lookup of their serial numbers.
hi kcbass thanks for the info,
what happens if you try shutting down the drobo, and then using another tool to fully wipe 1 of those drives that you dont need, such as with a boot and nuke program by darik or something similar, dban i think its called.
(please make to fully understand how to use it so that you do not wipe the wrong drive, but that might help to fully wipe the drive)
having said that though, the drobo may still be detecting something about those particular drives that it does not like, and may either still ultimately end up rejecting them, and possibly putting extra work/strain on other drives if it initiates more rebuilds when it rejects them even it it adds them back in for a while.
when you get a chance, would you be able to post back with some more details about each of those drives that it is rejecting, inclluding model numbers and firmware of those drives, and also some more info about your current fs dashboard and firmware?