Too many drives removed (after having installed two new drives!)

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1

I have a 4 bay drobo with USB2 and Firewire. I think its a Gen 2 Drobo.
I’ve been running 2 2TB drives and 1 1.5TB drive for years, with one bay empty. About a month ago one of my 2TB drives died.

So I ordered [urhttp://www.amazon.com/Western-Digital-Caviar-Desktop-WD20EARS/dp/B002ZCXK0I]two new ones from Amazon - both are 2TB WD Green[/url].

I replaced the bad drive with one of the new drives and waited several days for the data protection process to finish. When I had 3 green lights, I installed the fourth drive. That green light came on almost instantly.

Everything seemed fine for about 2 weeks, then suddenly yesterday all the lights turned red. I checked the drobo monitor and it only shows the 2 old drives as being online. The 2 new WD drives both looked like they were not installed.

In a panic, I ejected the drives and re-installed them. The drobo is now in it’s data protection process again (which I expect to take a few days the way it did the first time).

Note that I have NOT put any new data on the Drobo as this is just an archive server. I have only used around 3TB of space.

The question is, did I lose all of my data?
Is this a common problem? How could I have two new drives fail simultaneously?

2

hi, the process you used to replace the initially wrong drive seems ok

and when you added an extra one into the empty bay, that is pretty much an expansion of space, and is fairly quick compared with an actual rebuild which is about 1 day per 1tb of data that you have on the drobo.

when things were fine for 2 weeks, and then you got the all red, it might just be that those 2 drives were not pushed in as firmly as required, and that they vibrated loose?

if it is rebuilding again, then that is usually a good sign compared with when it says too many drives protected, so id suggest just waiting it out and letting it rebuild and then see what happens.

please note, if you want to reseat any drives its bess to power all down, and then to eject/put them back in, and then to power up. hope this helps a bit but usually its good to ask and wait if in doubt, just to play safe :slight_smile: