I have an original USB Drobo and recently have had problems with extremely slow (<100KB/s) write speeds (read seems to be ok). Dashboard and firmware are most recent versions available (2.5.2/1.3.8), health is reported as good, 1.08TB of 4.53TB free (2/2/2/1TB drives).
I’ve seen suggestions in other threads that one drive may be unreliable but undetected as such by the Drobo. Is there any in-place drive diagnostic available, or is shutting the whole thing down, unplugging the drives, and testing them one-by-one externally really the only option?
hello hendel,
usually when a drobo gets quite full, it slows down, but in your case you seem to still have about 25% free.
the dashboard has a feature to generate diagnostic logs, which you can then send to support via a ticket, and they will be able to let you know if a drive is having problems etc.
just in case it is a bad drive, it might be good to do some preparation on where to buy a replacement drive from, and how long it takes to come etc.
depending on which drobo you have (usb only gen1, usb/firewire gen2), it could take at least 4 days for the replacement drive process to complete, (eg where drobo does a re-layout of the data across the drives for protection)
the 4-slot drobo gen1/gen2 models can tolerate 1 drive failure, which may be enough to allow a relayout to complete, even if you do end up having to replace a faulty drive, but only so long as you dont have another drive popout or go faulty during it.
do you have a backup copy of your data hendel, or is the 4-slot drobo your only source?
(if no backup, it might be a good idea to copy the data somewhere else too, while you still have good read speeds but its up to you).
With regard to the Drobo being “full”, does the status of individual partitions matter, or just the total amount of free space?
Since my Drobo is so old, how much support can I expect - am I able to open a support ticket?
I probably will go ahead and order another 2TB to replace the last 1TB anyway. I do have other backups of all the “critical” data on the Drobo, but since I use it as the storage for my media server there’s a lot of data on it that’d be merely “inconvenient” to lose.
Tried opening a ticket and attaching the diagnostic file in the hope that Drobo would at least tell me if it indicated a problem with one of the drives. Not surprisingly (or, I suppose, entirely unreasonably) their response was “Try again when you’ve purchased a new Drobo”. Is there any guide available for trying to interpret the diagnostic file myself?
The fullness is for the total free space on the drobo.
You should be able to log a ticket for that… one of the positive service differentiators of the drobo support team, was that they look after their own. eg, that even if it’s an older model, with newer/better ones being released, they said they would still help with basic support, such as letting you know if one of your drives is bad etc.
i dont think they would offer you full replacements etc, but basic support i would expect, especially so if you had a support pack from them too.
A little help translating the diagnostic file and identifying if I have an undiagnosed problem drive is all I was looking for, but their response was that I could either buy a newer unit or try getting help here in the forum. So I looked at the current 5N model (would I be able to just plug all of my current drives into that and be able to access the data?), but also at Synology, etc.
(Sigh). Another point against Drobo while I’m weighing alternatives, then. If I have to manually copy all my data off to something else before building a new array, it’d be just as much work as switching to something else. What I get for being an early adopter, I guess. Don’t suppose Drobo has any kind of loaner program for situations like this?
hmm the loan program was something i thought about, about a year ago lol
depending on where you live, i think ‘rambo’ deals in multiple units, maybe for larger businesses but if youre close to him maybe theres an option there.
am not sure how to help re the diagnostics file and decoding it (some users here had a way if you search the posts, and 1 theoretical method was to back up your data, and then reset the drobo to version 1 firmware and then use the old decode script - but then you have to know how to interpret it - some of it is basic ASCII art in the form of temperature / data read over time etc etc graph tables or something similar, but other parts i wasnt so sure about)
if you’ve had good experiences all this time upto recently with your drobo, then please try to bear that in mind in any
future decisions
have you asked them if they can simply look at your log to let you know if a drive is reporting problems? at least they might be able to see an obvious culprit that you could replace, or were you trying to get them to decode the whole thing for you?)
for new models though, i actually think for any device, copying & verifying your data onto a new target device, is actually the best way to go in general.
eg, if you want to buy a new 5d, its best to copy your data there for safety, before zapping your old setup.
(especially when people have lots more data nowadays, if you lose it you lose a lot + i think there were reports of Fresh drive packs being more efficient in terms of performance, rather than Migrated/upgraded packs)[hr]
(btw just thinking about it, your early adoption might actually be saving your bacon, because if there are actual drive failures, a lesser raid device might have already droped the whole array of data by now)
Doesn’t hurt to ask, but you’re probably better off getting a Drobo v2 on eBay or something, unless you find someone locally who will let you borrow their chassis for a few days.
