Summary :
Drobo’s outsourced engineering team is draining my time, budget and (worst of all) access to my data. Abandon Ship!
Detail:
My support case with Drobo Tech Support is 201111-102299 filed on November 11. Since then, the 5D3 goes through cycles of declaring a drive has failed, then a day or two of “Data Protection mode”, followed by re-inserting the “failed” drive back in and Drobo marks it as good … followed by Drobo later deciding another drive has failed and the cycle repeats. Along the way, tech support has zero assistance other than to suggest I use a USB cable with 20mb/s transmission speed connected to a high-end 2019 MacBookPro with Thunderbolt 3. I have little to no remaining faith that Drobo’s outsourced engineering team should be trusted to write KEXT drivers for macOS.
My immediate workaround :
Buy a 6TB drive and thunderbolt 3 external disk dock, copy the contents of my Drobo over to that drive, and then use a resilio.com client application on my MacBookPro to continuously replicate the 6TB drive to my zfs & double-disk failure proof 8-drive TrueNAS.com tower – where I have automated snapshots enabled to recover to any point in time within my 36TB storage capacity there.