How can you check the internal temperature?

Drobo - End of Sale Drobo FS
1

I think the fan replacement in my DroboFS failed after a couple weeks (shame, those were a couple blissfully quiet weeks). How can I check the internal temperature of the DroboFS? One person mentioned theirs in the fan replacement thread, but never followed up with how they did it.

In the meantime, I’m very worried now about the health of my disk pack.

2

I was intrigued enough by your question to have a look at what could be done. Here’s a summary of what I found out.

  1. It seemed, at first, that the disks were exposed through normal block devices under /dev. I.e., there exists a /dev/sda through /dev/sde.
  2. I found a little utility called hddtemp ( https://savannah.nongnu.org/projects/hddtemp/ ) that accesses the SMART interface and prints out the temperature.
  3. A quick round of cross compiling later and I got it running on the FS.
  4. Unfortunately, this is what comes out of it:
# ./hddtemp /dev/sda                                                                     
/dev/sda: DROBO DroboPro: S.M.A.R.T. not available
# ./hddtemp /dev/sdb                                                                     
/dev/sdb: open: No such device or address
# ./hddtemp /dev/sdc                                                                     
/dev/sdc: open: No such device or address
# ./hddtemp /dev/sdd                                                                     
/dev/sdd: open: No such device or address
# ./hddtemp /dev/sde                                                                     
/dev/sde: open: No such device or address

In other words: all the disks are hidden away behind a virtual /dev/sda block device.

This is pure speculation, but I think there probably is a proprietary interface to access that data, as it is usually the case with RAID controllers ( http://sourceforge.net/apps/trac/smartmontools/wiki ).

I’ll try to cross compile smartmontools, but I think it won’t help much. My guess is that DRI’s virtual SCSI device is not compatible with any of the ones supported by smartmontools.