Fan making loud noise; ball bearings giving out?

Forum History Drobo 5D
1

I noticed this morning that my 5D fan is making a rhythmic grinding noise. I’ve checked all of the drives and isolated it to the rear of the machine. It’s outputting very little air movement in the back. I turned the Drobo off for a while, rebooted it, and the noise came back after a couple of minutes.

I bought the 5D back in 2012 so I’m far outside of warranty. It’s an important tool in my business so I need to get it fixed. Any suggestions? I imagine Drobo support will be very expensive, is this something I can fix myself?

Edit: I also can’t get the Drobo support portal to let me enter a support request. It keeps giving me a login error page. :frowning:

2

Sounds like the fan is indeed going out, but it can be replaced easily. I just replaced the fan in my 5N… I believe the 5N and the 5D use the same fan.

http://www.drobospace.com/forums/showthread.php?tid=145920&pid=197703&highlight=fan#pid197703

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Awesome, thank you very much for the info. I’ll see what I can do and report back.

4

Just wanted to report back that the instructions and fan you linked to worked perfectly AzDragonLord. Took about 45 minutes to replace the fan and I’m back up and running for about $20. It looks like the 5D and 5N use the same fan and chassis so all of the instructions were the same.

Thanks very much for the help!

5

::thumbs up::