I have a 4 Bay Drobo and had 3 2TB hard drives occupying some space. I decided to get a 4TB hard drive because I was running out of space and went to insert it into the empty bay.
At literally the exact same moment one of the bays with the 2TB drives went from a green light to a red light. Now it’s flashing red and when I boot up the Drobo Dashboard it tells me that I have a hard drive failure and need to replace it. What are the chances this happened at exactly the same time I inserted a new drive into the empty bay?
Has anyone ever heard of or experienced this before?
i’m told each Tb of data takes as much as 20 hours to rebuild.
If you are lucky!!! As I mention in another post, it is FAR more efficient to copy all data on the Drobo to backup HDDs first, then wipe the Drobo and reformat. When completed, then restore the data back to the Drobo. You cut the time needed to 10-20% what is needed for a relayout.
The last time I did a relayout with active data on my Gen 2 Drobo to increase the storage from 6 to 8 TB, it took over a week to complete, all the while saying my data was not protected! A couple of months after that, I had to swap out one of the 2TB drives that failed, and using FW400, backup/relayout/restore took less than 2 days.
Secondary benefit is that I don’t have to worry about data loss if a second drive fails during relayout.
There are many issues that can cause problems during relayout, including permission errors. Using the backup/relayout/restore method has completely eliminated those problems.
In my experience…
As for Support Entitlement, when my Gen 2 Drobo starting acting up (out of warranty), I bought new one year warranty coverage ($190 I think), and DR promptly sent me a new unit. The new unit is completely covered under the new warranty. I don’t know of any company that will sell you extended warranty after your original warranty expires. And considering a new Drobo is at least double the cost of the additional warranty, it is a bargain, as I would have had a Drobo brick otherwise.
Were you continually using the Drobo while it was performing the relayout? If so, that’s why it took so long. You should leave it alone or, preferably, disconnect it from the PC altogether - then it’d be finished much faster. Anyway, anything newer than Gen.2 is much quicker when it comes to relayouts.
How so? Unless you’re offloading your data to another redundant storage or copy everything twice, how’s your data sitting on the temporary drives protected any more than it’d be during the normal relayout?
This is not true. The process responsible for relayout neither cares nor understands the filesystem-level permissions. It just shuffles raw data around.
I don’t agree with this advice and recommend following the normal procedure, letting the Drobo do the thing it’s been designed to.