I have a drobo s with 5 3TB drives in it and set up with dual drive redundancy. With that setup, there is 8 TB of total space. After moving 3 TB to my media server, I was left with 3.8 TB of data. No reason to have 8TB of space for 3.8 TB of data, so I removed a drive.
Currently, my drobo s has 4 green lights and one red light with the message “Drobo cannot protect your data against hard drive failures until you provide at least 2 hard drives for single disk redundancy or 3 hard drives for dual disk redundancy. Insert a new hard drive into the empty bay indicated by the red light to enable Drobo to protect your data against hard drive failure.”
The drobo is showing I have dual disk redundancy, 5.4 TB of total space, 3.8 TB used with 1.59 TB of free space.
Shouldn’t the Drobo start reorganizing my data across the 4 drives?
DD reports I have 3.8TB. Here is the weird thing. DD shows 3.8TB used showed both when I had 4 or 5 drives in the drobo. I guess I could turn off the dual redundancy and hope the drobo thinks there is “enough” space available. Then after the drobo has stabilized, turn dual redundancy back on.
I deleted the 3TB two days ago. I thought a couple days would be long enough before removing the drive. But still, I have dual redundancy so the drobo shouldn’t have a problem. Of course that was an assumption.
I just had a drive fail in my DroboPro, and saw the same behaviour. I power-cycled it and fiddled with settings, to no avail.
To settle my mind, I changed it to single-redundancy, let it rebuild, and then changed it back to dual-redundancy. It’s happy now.
When in dual disk redundancy the first rebuild is going to be a quick re-sync that happens in the background since you are still protected against hard drive failure at that point.
If a second hard drive were to fail or be removed before it completed that sync, it would then be in a degraded state and would start through the rebuild and warn you via the flashing lights and Dashboard that it is unable to protect against hard drive failures, etc.
I believe this also applies when you are adding new drives to a Drobo in DDR - it will not rebuild unless you add a second.
(i tend to leave mine as it is, but close all other programs and services and internet etc first, to minimise other interactions, except the dashboard software).
hang in there and im sure it will finish as soon as it can
Update: Drobo S with (4) 3TB drives. 8.17 TB space with SR and 5.41 TB space with DR. 2.91 TB of data.
Sunday night the drobo stabilized. Green lights in 1,2,3, & 5. I turn on dual redundancy and light 4 immediately turns red and the drobo tells me I have to insert another drive for dual redundancy.
I immediately switch back to single redundancy and the drobo is back being stable. Thinking I may need to “shake things up”, I turn off the drobo, move the drive from 5 to 4, and turn the drobo back on.
I turn on DR and it starts to rebuild. Woohoo.
Monday afternoon the drobo stabilized and, once more, a red light turned on next to the empty bay and said I needed another drive for DR. Grrrrrr. After a few minutes, the drobo started to blink green and yellow and go back into rebuild mode.
Currently it is still blinking green/yellow but should be done within 13 hours. Hopefully.
The lesson learned? What I learned a while back on earlier drobos. If I have the free drive space available, it is always faster to just copy the data from the drobo, reconfigure a drobo with very little or no data, then copy it back.
just to recap dpuett, was it about 15hours overall for about 3TB of data?
if so, that comes down to about 5hours per TB (which is much much quicker than a gen1 relayout/expansion)
