Network share repeatedly disappears after a couple of hours

Drobo - End of Sale Drobo 5N
1

Just got my first Drobo, a 5N, and am using 2 brand-new WD 3TB Green drives. I’m running Windows 7 64-bit, and have it connected to a D-Link DSL6740U router (provided by my ISP).

After switching the Drobo on, I let everything initialize, and after 30 minutes, the 5N appeared as a drive in Windows Explorer under Computer -> Network Location, and things were ready to go.

I began copying data over there, and after a while (perhaps an hour or so?), the 5N’s share just disappeared. Drobo Dashboard was still able to see it, but the network share was gone, and I could not even manually mount it through Shares in the Dashboard.

Restarting the Drobo via Tools -> Restart works, and the share reappears without any further action once the Drobo has rebooted, but after another while, it disappears again.

Each time it’s disappeared, I was in the middle of transferring large amounts of data… not sure if that affects things or not. The router is only a 100mb router, so the transfers are only going at around 11 megabytes/sec.

Any clues?

2

I would make sure your drives arent told to spin down. Did you manually map the network drive in windows?

3

The drives are told to spin down, and that would make sense if the Drobo wasn’t disappearing in the middle of data transfers.

I did not manually map the drive in Windows - I have been letting the Drobo Dashboard do that automatically, using the default network share it came configured with.

Incidentally, Windows gives some interesting information when I try to access the Drobo via the network after it’s disappeared. I changed the Drobo workgroup to “HOME” to match the rest of my machines, and now Windows sees it under Network. When I click on it, however, I get this Network Error dialog box:

[quote][size=large][color=#4682B4]Windows cannot access \DROBO5N[/color][/size]

Check the spelling of the name, blah blah, etc. Error code: 0x80070035 - The network path was not found.[/quote]

Clicking the Diagnose button brings up the real goodies:

Any of that help? There’s also the Network Diagnostics Log, but I’m not sure it’s all that wise to post it to a public forum…

4

What router do you have? Some older routers go brain-dead under heavy load. Also, some smarter routers detect high traffic and try to apply QoS and/or storm protection, which can also interrupt the connection.

5

I’ve got a fairly modern one - a D-Link DSL-6740U.

The thing is, it’s also disappearing randomly, without any traffic. I haven’t used the Drobo 5N since I finished copying all my data to it, and right now, the share is missing again.

6

I somehow doubt that Drobo is the culprit here. I’m struggling with my share (heh) of intermittent 0x80070035 errors with my Windows 8.1 to Windows 8.1 network. Albeit I host my shares on direct-connected Drobo S, I don’t think that really matters here. In my case, when I open File Explorer to browse my network shares, I have some 50/50 chances of succeeding after the first try - it’s 0x80070035 the other half of times. Interestingly, the share mounted as a drive letter is much more reliable, as are the HomeGroup-hosted resources. It’s only the shares listed under the “Network” branch I have these problems with. However, if I leave the Explorer Window open for several seconds before I try and let it do its queries or whatever it has to do, the success rate seems much higher. I think this could have something to do with IPv6 stack on newer Windows editions and I have actually read some success reports after disabling IPv6 altogether. As far as I know, NetBIOS over TCPIP - the legacy mechanism used for name resolution on Windows networks is not defined for IPv6 but Microsoft (and rightly so) is pushing IPv6 as the main and default networking stack since quite some time. So perhaps there’s another name resolution mechanism implemented for IPv6 (I think I read something about that somewhere but cannot recall any details). And maybe they don’t play well with each other and the system doesn’t switch / fall back between them gracefully?

Bhiga, as for the router being an issue here, theoretically, this shouldn’t be the case, I think. The NetBIOS lookups are done using Layer 2 broadcasts and generally all the SMB stuff happens on the (hardware implemented) Ethernet switch side. Therefore, all the Windows networking activities shouldn’t be reaching the routing logic at all or bother the router’s CPU. For what it’s worth, while troubleshooting, I’ve connected my two computers to the hardware Ethernet switch and only then connected the switch to my router. So the two computers should, and probably are, talking to each other via this switch only. Nothing has changed. But then again, there’s not much that could surprise me anymore as far as the computers go :wink: Well, there is one thing to check on the router level, actually. Some routers offer, in the DHCP configuration, several options for NetBIOS announcement, including the lack of. In generic home network the right option would be the “Broadcast only” / “b-mode” or something among the lines. It tells Windows systems to use broadcast-based NetBIOS over TCP/IP lookups when their network connections are configured with the defaults. It doesn’t seem to do much in my case, though.

7

I am 100% certain the Drobo 5N is the culprit - I have the same issue since I bought this 4 weeks ago.

Except its not just my shares that disappear, the copying and reading hangs constantly too … and comes back… and hangs. Copies are successful (have tested) but its taken me 4 weeks to move 4Tb of data onto this thing! And sometimes it hangs so badly (so long even that the disks power down!) you need to crash the copy and start again. Files of a few meg seem to go through okay, but anything larger (or even say testing a decent zip archive) and the hanging and disappearing drives comes back. Media streaming is a slideshow.

The reason I know this is the culprit as I was (and unfortunately still need to) happily running a less capacious Welland NAS until I was to replace that with this. My network config identical other than adding the Drobo and its extra IP. They are both plugged into same switch at same speed & talked to from same PCs. Tried multiple EUDs, and have tried shares both mapped in Windows and by Drobo Dashboard. Power down disks both on and off (although agree this should have no effect in the MIDDLE of accessing it). Copied the same files to both - Welland runs the 100m spint, Drobo runs like it has to climb a brick walls every 10 yards.

I even forked out for an mSATA cache drive to see if that was the problem - no difference. The problem continues, so unfortunately the idea that the issues here are somehow not Drobo doesn’t apply to me.

Oh did I mention how this is driving me crazy, email/phone support have been useless (another everything but the Drobo attitude or no ideas) and ironically its just frozen twice on me while I was copying some files in the background while typing this entry.

Its not a brick, but its pretty close use-wise right now. I’d have done better with a $100 external drive from Wal-mart.

Drobo - there is a problem here.[hr]
I am 100% certain the Drobo 5N is the culprit - I have the same issue since I bought this 4 weeks ago.

Except its not just my shares that disappear, the copying and reading hangs constantly too … and comes back… and hangs. Copies are successful (have tested) but its taken me 4 weeks to move 4Tb of data onto this thing! And sometimes it hangs so badly (so long even that the disks power down!) you need to crash the copy and start again. Files of a few meg seem to go through okay, but anything larger (or even say testing a decent zip archive) and the hanging and disappearing drives comes back. Media streaming is a slideshow.

The reason I know this is the culprit as I was (and unfortunately still need to) happily running a less capacious Welland NAS until I was to replace that with this. My network config identical other than adding the Drobo and its extra IP. They are both plugged into same switch at same speed & talked to from same PCs. Tried multiple EUDs, and have tried shares both mapped in Windows and by Drobo Dashboard. Power down disks both on and off (although agree this should have no effect in the MIDDLE of accessing it). Copied the same files to both - Welland runs the 100m spint, Drobo runs like it has to climb a brick walls every 10 yards.

I even forked out for an mSATA cache drive to see if that was the problem - no difference. The problem continues, so unfortunately the idea that the issues here are somehow not Drobo doesn’t apply to me.

Oh did I mention how this is driving me crazy, email/phone support have been useless (another everything but the Drobo attitude or no ideas) and ironically its just frozen twice on me while I was copying some files in the background while typing this entry.

Its not a brick, but its pretty close use-wise right now. I’d have done better with a $100 external drive from Wal-mart.

Drobo - there is a problem here.[hr]
Sorry guys I got an SQL error posting & it appears to have since added my post twice…

8

Interesting, 6 years later and I am experiencing the same thing in the last couple months. Previous 2 years, no problem. 5N with all WD Red drives (10,10,10,8,8). Any transfer over a couple hundred megs has 50/50 chance before the Windows share disappears, sometimes Drobo console can reconnect the share, sometimes not. Tried direct connect, different cables, three different Win10 PCs (one hours out of the box) and they all fail. Did notice that with a direct connect during a simple Windows file copy the transfer speed was 11MB/sec, rebooted Drobo and achieved the more normal 110-130 MB/sec.

Is it just a case of the Ethernet port dying? I do not know enough to access and internal error logs.