On a 2nd Gen. FW Drobo, which has a storage cap. of 5.42 TB - (1) 3TB drive and (3) 2 TB drives and 5.01 TB is used space, after inserting a new drive and the drobo going through it’s rebuild for 4 or 5 days the activity light is still flashing approx. every 5 seconds or so (the rebuild was over ~4 days ago - unless this indicates still rebuilding but slowly?). There is only 425.22 GB of free space available. Is the drobo still rebuilding for optimization, since their is so little free space available or does this flashing every 5 seconds indicate something else?
Which light are you referencing as the “activity light?”
If it’s the light that is behind the cover and not normally visible on a 2nd Gen 4-bay Drobo, then that is the activity LED and indicates access from the connected computer. Even if the connected computer is idle, it might still be doing some background thing like antivirus scan or indexing.
If you’re talking about the lights next to each of the drive bays, those should be solid green and stay that way.
What does Drobo Dashboard tell you the status of the Drobo is?
Yes, the light is the activity LED that is visible only after the cover is removed. Looks to me dashboard is showing the rebuild (if that is the right term) is finish. Is there a way to post attachments here? I could attach screenshots of the dashboard.
Here’s a twist. I decided to put Drobo into stand-by via dashboard since we are having a thunder storm. Drobo dismounted in dashboard and on desktop, but when I looked at Drobo all the bay lights are on, the power lights are on, the blue lights are on and the Drobo sounds like there is activity occuring (noises and such(, but the activity LED is not on. Any thoughts?
Drobo does various optimization tasks in the background, so drive noise does not necessarily indicate it’s rebuilding from a degraded mode. Also, sometimes the PC doesn’t electrically assert the unmount (I dimly remember Apple didn’t do this quite properly with certain models).
Pull the USB cable and it should go to standby.
Thanks for your input rdo. I didn’t see your reply until this morning. I ended up powering down the mac mini, due to ensuing electrical storm. I can’t remember if I pulled the firewire cable first, or just powered down the mini with drobo attached (I think I pulled firewire cable first - because that is usually what I’d do). I know that after I shut down the mini the drobo was still all lit up ( that is the bay lights where green except for one that is yellow - need to eventually swap drive once I figure this out), can’t remember if the noise I indicated in previous post stopped immediately after powering off mini, but within a 1/2 hour of shutting down mini the drive noise had stopped and I pulled the power plug on the drobo (all bay lights on, power light on but LED activity lights off - drobo would not go into standby mode and the storm was here, so that is why I pulled power plug on drobo). After powering up mini and drobo this morning the drobo drives are making noise as if they are being accessed (same noise as I mentioned before) and the LED activity light is back to flashing approx. every 5 seconds. This has been going on for an hour. I’ll update later today to let know if same is still happening or if things settled down.
You can post attachments using the full reply (either click one of the Reply buttons under a post, or click Preview Post in the Quick Reply section at the bottom).
I would consider an intermittent blink of the activity light as normal. When there’s a running system connected, lots of things happen in the background.
When a full rebuild and possible lack of protection occurs, the drive bay lights will blink Green/Yellow.
As rdo says, Drobo does lots of other “housekeeping” tasks in the background too, so even when not connected to a computer it might still be doing stuff, as long as has power and is on.
rdo is also right that the Gen 2 4-bay Drobo does not go to standby until the data cable is disconnected - at least that’s how both my units worked on the 3 machines I’ve used them on.
[quote=“bhiga, post:7, topic:133351”]
I would consider an intermittent blink of the activity light as normal.[/quote]
So I shouldn’t worry about putting drobo into standby via dashboard and if drobo dismounts (not sure if right term?) via dashboard, even with intermittent blink I can pull data cable and then pull power plug? I’m trying to be sure, because if drobo is doing some kind of optimizing in the background would it still be o.k. to swap drives and put in a bigger drive, even with the intermitting blinking of the LED activity light?[hr]
Update: The hard drive noise has stopped, but intermitting blink is back and still occurring as mentioned in original post.[hr]
A bit more info about my set up to inform. This 2nd Gen. FW Drobo is used for back-ups to a main 2nd Gen. FW Drobo. The main drobo does not exhibit this intermittent blinking of the activity light. In the past month, I’ve tried 2X to swap one of the back-up 2TB drives with a 3TB drive. Immediately after swapping the drives the bay lights went red and various things registered on the dashboard (for example, the new 3TB showed in dashboard but then the drive below it did not register in dashboard - dashboard warned that too many drives have been removed and I needed to put original drive back in). So twice now I put original drive back in and I had to wait 4 or 5 days, both times, for drobo to rebuild back to original state.
Have you sent a logfile to Drobo? Even though the unit is out of warranty, they will tell you what the unit is reporting.
I would suggest opening a case.
http://www.drobo.com/support/contact-support/
Are you sure about that. I wrote to them about this and the tech who responded did not suggest that. They said I’d have to buy Drobocare for them to help.
Drobo Tech Support has said in these forums that they will decrypt diagnostic logs and tell us what’s going on, even outside of contract support or warranty. They will not provide us access to decrypted diagnostics, though.
I would ask the tech to look in your diagnostic file and tell you what’s going on in your Drobo. If the person refuses, I would escalate to a manager to confirm the policy in writing.
Thanks rdo, I’ll give it a shot. BTW you wouldn’t have a link where tech said that in these forums?
Here’s where Sky said out-of-warranty replacement obviously requires DroboCare, but otherwise they will help as best they can.
http://www.drobospace.com/forums/showthread.php?tid=30249&pid=59763#pid59763
(that’s also refered to as the ‘sandwich’ thread) 
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