Performance slowed down drastically

Drobo - End of Sale Drobo S
1

Hello all,
I hope someone can help.
I have been using my Drobo S for almost a year now. It has been working flawlessly with one 2TB and three 1TBs installed. I have been using it on my old MBP with eSATA, then had to switch to FW800 when I got my new iMac. Things kept working fine. Performance was as expected under FW800. A few days ago, I tried accessing a folder that I backed up everything from my old laptop in. It has thousands of files. That’s all I did or all the details I can give about the events before the problem happened. Since then, performance has been extremely slow compared to any point before. Slower than USB. I cannot even begin understanding why or how to fix this. PLEASE help. My work depends on this machine.

Here is what I did to try to fix it, if it comes of any assistance:

  1. Tried USB 2 instead of FW800, tried each on different ports.
  2. Used on a physical Windows machine and an emulated one on my Mac.
  3. Updated my Drobo S firmware and Dashboard to latest firmware and update.
  4. Disconnected cables from Drobo and iMac after shutting down both for a few minutes.
  5. Checked if Drobo is full. Not at all.
  6. Disabled spotlight indexing.
  7. Contacted support, awaiting their response.
2

i guess it could be that one of your drives has started to fail - one of the first signs of this is that it can take a long time to respond to requests for data - dramatically slowing down your drobo

support will probably ask for a copy of your log and then let you know if that is the case.

apart from that i cant offer too much advice im afraid

3

I just received a reply from support. I am following the instructions as requested.

I would be surprised if any of the drives failed. I purchased all four of them around the same time, and I have not been using my Drobo very intensely.

All lights are green, how can I know which drive may be failing?

Thank you for your help and time.

4

Support will have to analyze your logs to tell you which drive(s) are having problems.

Drives, like light bulbs, unfortunately can fail at any time, it’s just one of those things. Usually you get a fairly predictable amount of life out of them, but every now and then you get one that “burns out” early - or late.

There’s a fuzzy gray area between working fine, no problems and malfunctioning, broken. I like to call it going bad versus bad or good. Definitely sounds like you’re in that zone.

Start looking at replacement drive pricing/availability and wait for support.