I have a 5N populated with 5 3TB WD Reds, single redundancy (with 7.1T of data currently)
Yesterday a drive failed (#1) and the Drobo has gone into data protection mode. (I have no on-hand spare but a 5TB WD Red will arrive Tuesday.)
DD shows 3 messages (paraphrasing):
In data protection mode, do not remove any drive with yellow/green light.
Red Alert, replace drive indicated with blinking red light.
Data redundancy in critical state, do not remove any drive.
The third message conflicts with the other two. Not reassuring. I’m assuming that it should be saying “do not remove any drive showing green or green/yellow lights”.
Overnight, the failed drive apparently came online again for a short time (<2 minutes) then died again, triggering a flurry of emails.
Should I remove the failed drive to prevent it doing that again?
Yes, I agree it’s misleading. It’s a very simple user interface, about as dumbed down as it’s possible to get but they still got it wrong. I would go by the instructions printed on the inside of the front cover and ignore the Dashboard messages. It should say “do not remove any drive showing blinking green/yellow lights”. It’s always safe to remove a drive with a steady green light or with a blinking red light.
As an aside, I believe it should be safe to remove a drive with a steady red light at any time too, but it would only make sense to do so in order to replace it immediately with another, preferably larger capacity, drive. If the other drives are blinking green/yellow (as can happen if you have dual disk redundancy selected and mismatched capacities) I would be tempted to wait until data protection had completed before replacing the drive with the steady red light.
Your problematic drive might be due to it not being seated properly.