I’ve never seen the extra info menu, just tried clicking, control-clicking, etc on the drives in the status window, nothing happened.
Below is the progression of my work on the drobo covering about 6 weeks. Perhaps not the clearest, as I’ve tried many different
things and the config/setup has changed with those attempts.
When this all started (prob 6 weeks ago now) the unit was ~70% full. It was set to DDR and had 3x 1.5TB drives and 3x 2TB drives. Pretty sure all the drives are WD greens and were in the following setup:
Slot 1: 1.5 TB
Slot 2: 1.5 TB
Slot 3: 2 TB
Slot 4: 1.5TB
Slot 5: Empty
Slot 6: 2TB
Slot 7: 2TB
Slot 8: Empty
It was one of the 1.5TB drives in the first slot that I pulled which seemed to stop the constant rebooting.
I still have the first drive pulled out. It was the only thing that seemed to stop the unit from continually rebooting. There were no warning lights on that drive before I pulled it. I didn’t believe I could be lucky enough to have the first drive be the problem, so I wondered if the power supply was going and one less drive to spin was the actual problem, but when I reinserted it and pulled a different one, it still rebooted.
It was also asking for a new disk, saying it couldn’t provide redundancy, so I started deleting data as much as possible. Warnings never went away even as I got the data usage down under 50%.
When the unit restarts, there are various warnings about capacity, such as rebuilding, 100% full, etc. These are usually based on incorrect amount of data stored. I watched it closely just now after a failed overnight copy and the warnings happen when Drobo Dashboard has connected but the drive isn’t mounted yet. Once it mounts in the OS, Dashboard changed (from 3+ TB used to 1.14 currently).
I gave up on it for about a month until a few days ago when I turned it back on. Now it reported one of the 2TB drives to be dead, so I have now pulled it as well. Tried re-inserting, but still reported dead. So current status is:
Slot 1: Empty, flashing red asking for new drive (1.5 TB pulled)
Slot 2: 1.5 TB
Slot 3: 2 TB
Slot 4: 1.5TB
Slot 5: Empty
Slot 6: Empty (2 TB pulled)
Slot 7: 2TB
Slot 8: Empty
Even with the 4 remaining drives (2x 1.5TB and 2x 2TB) it was giving errors saying “Cannot protect your data against hard drive failures until you provide at least 2 hard drives for single disk redundancy or 3 blah blah blah” and asking for a new disk. Obviously didn’t make any sense as it had 50% free space (I had deleted some data off in last attempts to fix).
I’ve been (slowly, because of the problems) deleting data off, and it’s down to 29% used (1.14TB). Also, I turned off DDR, restarted the drobo, and then re-enabled DDR just to see. Drobo Desktop is now saying “…converting to DDR. This will protect your data from 2 drive failures” now. The capacity circle graph is now flashing green/yellow, but it’s been “converting” for 12 hours now.
As I’ve managed to copy some data, I’ve noticed that it acts normally at times, copying quickly, and then hits a patch where it slows to a crawl. Even opening a folder will take a minute or two (or 10) sometimes. Trying to delete a folder of pictures with about 12k files (not all in one folder) earlier today took about 7 minutes to move to trash. I gave up on emptying the trash after the “Preparing to empty” count had only reached 3,000 after 40 minutes. I moved on to some other files which deleted more quickly, but not normally.
Makes me think one of the disks is having problems, but I can’t tell which one, and the data should be replicated across more than one. My only other thought is that the slow parts are the drobo reconstructing data from one of the two missing drives from checksums (assuming the redundancy is similar to RAID5), but even if that was the case it wouldn’t be this slow. Feels more like a flaky disk that works just enough to not error out completely, but without any other info, really hard to tell. Of course now that two drive are seemingly bad and possibly a third in a short period of time, makes me wonder if the problem is with the drobo itself.
If i can get the rest of the data off, I’ll start pulling the remaining drives one at a time and see if the drobo speeds up, while testing them in a standalone external drive. Not sure I’ll trust this drobo ever again, but we’ll see what happens if I wipe everything.
I also looked through the diag files it output. Couldn’t find any obvious disk error, but there’s the encrypted file that unreadable.
On an overall note I’ve been really happy with the drobo and recommended to others over the years, even as I’ve been aware of the discussions/reviews. The flakiness and lack of info when things do go wrong is frustrating. Drobos are supposed to take the pain/tech out of reliable storage; that same philosophy should be followed when things are working and when they aren’t. Think that’s been the root cause of most of the complaints I’ve read about over the years.