Hi, I’ve been having network disconnects with my drobo-fs, as I see some other people are reporting. But I’ve got an additional problem, which I don’t know if it’s common:
When I first turn on my drobo-fs and it boots up…I get the screen on the dashboard that says “Drobo is starting up…” then the “Just a few seconds more…” then, about 1/2 the time, it goes to “Drobo not found” and I cannot connect to the drobo. I have to hit the manual shutdown switch on the back, and start it up a second time. This time, it boots normally and the dashboard can see the drobo.
The same happens if I have a network disconnect. Sometimes I’m saving a file from Photoshop and the drobo stops responding. It’s gone from the dashboard and I can not connect to network drives. I have to hit the switch on the back to shut it down…then go through the same double-boot to get the dashboard to recognize the drobo.
I’ve been dealing with support but they’re quite slow to respond. Anyone else have this issue?
Thanks…
I never face this problem. I am using it in a 25 users environment and the box never been turned OFF. Just put the HDD auto sleep in 15 minutes and running on 3 x WD 1TB Green 64MB.
Maybe you can try this if you have extra HDD. POWER OFF your drobo FS. Remove all the existing HDD. Don’t worry your data and setting won’t lost. All these infos were stored in the disk.
Connect the Drobo FS directly to your PC. Put in the new / spare HDD and power up the Drobo FS. Then try and see whether the problem persist.
Hope this helps 
I had a similar problem…for me it turned out to be a bad drive. The indicator light for the drive was not red, however the diagnostic file showed I/O errors and I had suspicion that the drive was bad. I pulled the drive and replaced it with a new unit and I have since had zero problems.
I posted some of my log here.
http://www.drobospace.com/forums/showthread.php?tid=1811&pid=14478#pid14478
Also, drobo support told me the following…
“Drobo tries to handle minor block errors on hard disks by marking them and then avoiding their use. This can cause lower performance while in the process of discovery and marking.
If errors exceed critical values, Drobo rejects the disk.”
My best guess is the drive had errors and the drobo got “confused” while I was trying to copy large amounts of data to it.
I’ve experienced the failure to boot on two separate units (with the same disk pack). The boot process will appear to complete (green lights on the drives, blue lights indicating correct capacity), and Drobo Dashboard will say “a few more seconds”. Then - nothing. Dashboard goes back to “Waiting for connection” and the FS is unreachable. I know it’s up on the network since the one thing it does respond to is ping, but anything else fails (Mac OS X Finder, Windows Explorer, Drobo Dashboard, dropbear SSH). Rebooting manually tends to fix it.
Drobo tech support took this to level 3 for me, and then punted, thinking it was a firmware issue on one of the drives. Not having excess drives around to test, I was never able to test this theory.
My best guess is something in the Linux layer is hitting a race condition, but the logs haven’t provided enough detail to determine it.
Thankfully I don’t run into any issues once the Drobo is up and running. Then it just runs and runs, so for now I’m trying to ignore the issue. Still irks me that something this expensive has problems like this.