I have a Drobo 4-bay (gen 2) for a number of years, and it is connected to a Mac Mini via Firewire. I have 3 + 3 + 2 + 2TB HDDs split into 2 volumes. running at about 75% capacity. All lights are green. No errors have been reported by Drobo.
Things have been going great until recently.
First, I notice that whenever Drobo is connected, starting Mac Disk Utility takes about 3 minutes. Disconnect Drobo, DU starts in seconds.
Second, whenever I need to copy a file into Drobo (say a 1GB file), it will wait for about 30 - 60 seconds before it will start copying.
Third, yesterday I was trying to copy a few GB out of Drobo to an external HDD connected to Mac, in addition to waiting a long time to start the transfer, during the transfer I noticed that it transferred data for about 5 seconds, and then paused for over 30 seconds, and transferred for another 5 seconds, and paused. So a 2 minute job turned into 30 minute.
Copying from local HDD to external drive is normal.
My Mac Mini is an older machine with Firewire and USB 2 support, it is connected to a USB 3 hub and the external HDD is interfacing it over USB 3 as well.
Can someone tell me what can be the problem, or suggest some tasks that I can do to diagnose?
Is there anyway I can individually check the health of each HDD?
I am having the same issues, right around 75% capacity. I don’t know how to check the health of individual drives; that seems to be available on newer Drobos, but not the Gen 2.
The good news is that performance has gone back to what it was. I think it was doing some extra housekeeping. When I copy new files over, I see slight performance degradation and then back to normal.
I’m considering increasing capacity to see if that helps, or just migrating to a Gen 3 or 5D.
hi jeremybrooks, it could be some housekeeping as you mentioned.
(drobo usually optimises data layout in the background, though if lots of data is added or changed/deleted then it can need a bit of time to settle back to normal)
usually when your used space increases a lot more such as 85% ot especially 95% it can go noticeably slower (though other storage devices slow down as they get more full too)
if your computer kept crashing or hanging programs and you got this slowdown often without increasing much more used space, then it (could) be indicative of a drive going bad, though drobo usually catches that first. (i had that before and the drobo rebuilt and flashed lights etc some days before marking the drive bad and then changed drives).
for klock are you still having the same issues?[hr]
hi jeremybrooks, it could be some housekeeping as you mentioned.
(drobo usually optimises data layout in the background, though if lots of data is added or changed/deleted then it can need a bit of time to settle back to normal)
usually when your used space increases a lot more such as 85% ot especially 95% it can go noticeably slower (though other storage devices slow down as they get more full too)
if your computer kept crashing or hanging programs and you got this slowdown often without increasing much more used space, then it (could) be indicative of a drive going bad, though drobo usually catches that first. (i had that before and the drobo rebuilt and flashed lights etc some days before marking the drive bad and then changed drives).