Failed drive in Drobo 3RD Gen, not really

1

I have a functioning 3rd Gen Drobo. It works reasonable well (sometimes it will just disappear on my desktop and I need to trun it on and off and then reboot then voila, back again)
The fourth drive went red as a failed drive and the device appropriately redistributed the data and which took a few hours. All the data was secured.
I removed the drive which is a 6TB WD Red SATA drive. The drive is about three years old and I would have it would last longer.
On a lark , connected the drive to an external adapter and inserted the USB cable to my desktop.
It needed initialization which I did and then formatting.
I ran chkdsk /f /r which found no issues.
I then reinserted the drive into the Drobo. Nothing to lose ( I think).
The drive installed as a brand new drive and there are no issues so far.
The dashboard reads it as healthy.

Curious if anybody has a similar experience or comments.
Thank you in advance.
Sal

2

It’s great that you are following your intuition when confronted with a problem, and even testing a frontier here and there!
I wonder If you have ever run a disk utility over your active Drobo? Some of these issues are corrupted directories, and it would be good to know if this was part of your regime as well?

3

It sometimes takes a little time but that drive will probably go bad sooner than later. I would have a new drive on standby ready to go when it happens.

4

I ordered a new drive regardless. There are 4 in there right now so I will have one as a replacement nonetheless.

5

I have never run chkdsk on the Drobo. I will see how that goes.
I have a 3rd gen at home and a 5D3 at work. Retired 1st gen in the cupboard.
Thank you all.
Sal

6

For follow up.
The 6TB drive that “failed” is working fine now that I have taken it out, reformatted, and run chkdsk.
Yesterday, a 4TB drive failed. The second drive in Drobo.
I did the same. Let Drobo redistribute the data to the remaining drives, took out the 4TB drive, ran chksk, reinstalled.
It may be that the Drobo is the issue…
I know am taking a chance, but it does not seem as likely that two different drives go out within a few days of each other. The drives are in the second and fourth bays (top to bottom). Both are WD Red drives.
I have also noticed that the Drobo will spontaneously disappear from my computer. I need to restart the Drobo and reboot the computer to get it recognized again.