Drobo Help

[Guy Mancuso]

Looks like i have a flashing Red light on disk 3. Looks like I may have a hard drive failure. Just replace it and toss out the bad drive. Advice please. I will most likely take the Drobo offline until I get a new drive, is this okay to do.

 

[Jack]

Guy, all you need to do is pull the bad drive and insert a replacement. First thing to try is popping it out then back in. If it's bad, it will flash red agin after a few minutes. If it's good, it will go yellow to tell you it's rebuilding. Sometimes if the DROBO gets bumped a drive will jostle just enough to appear scrambled when in fact nothing is wrong, why I recommend the popping out and back in. I had this happen a few times with Samsung drives, but never Seagates or WD's. You do not need to take the DROBO offline to do this --- jut pop the bad drive, wait 30 seconds and pop it back in.

 

[Guy Mancuso]

Well I had a 500gb drive sitting around so I replaced it . Now it may take several hours to at least get everything back in order. i ordered a 2TB drive but won't get here until maybe Monday. So I guess i can pull the 500gb and replace the 2gb than. I will check with you when that comes in. I will just leave the computer on all night and let it build back up. This stuff makes me nervous. LOL

 

[Guy Mancuso]

BTW Jack this was a older Maxtor 1tb drive that went south not my new Seagates. Good sign I can here the drives churning, just have to wait it out

 

[Don Libby]

Sounds like true plug and play. This is making me think as I have 4 WD 500GB drive now just sitting around looking for a new home. Is the Drobo PC friendly?

 

[Guy Mancuso]

Yes it is can work Firewire 800 or USB 2. http://www.drobo.com/index.php

 

[Jack]

Guy, yes you can pull the 500 and replace it with the 2TB when it arrives -- piece of cake and you do not even need to take the DROBO offline.

Don, yes DROBO is really that plug and play friendly. But that ease of use and maintenance comes at a price -- and that price is relatively slow rebuild times since it has to manage different size and speed drives in a RAID environment, which in turn requires allowing the onboard logic to do its thing.

 

[cjlacz]

Sounds like true plug and play. This is making me think as I have 4 WD 500GB drive now just sitting around looking for a new home. Is the Drobo PC friendly?

It depends on how much storage you want, but I'd probably recommend picking up a Drobo pro if you can justify the money. iSCSI works over ethernet and it's much faster then a SAN box.

If you really want to keep your important data on it, it's got a feature I feel you should have. Double redundancy. Basically your data is still safe, even if two drives die. (It uses 2 drives for backup though, compared to 1 on the basic drobo). This means if a drive dies while the Drobo is upgrading to a larger drive or replacing an old one your data is still safe. You'd lose all of it on a normal Drobo. The chances are small, but make sure your important stuff is backed up someplace else.

Still, either box is nice.

 

[Georg Baumann]

Crossing Fingers Guy!

Charles, If memory serves OSX does not support iSCSI so this might be only an option for MS users.

P.S. Just found it on Drobo's site:

However, OS X does not natively contain iSCSI support. Thus, Drobo Dashboard includes the necessary iSCSI software initiator for OS X—free of charge.

 

[ddk]

Looks like i have a flashing Red light on disk 3. Looks like I may have a hard drive failure. Just replace it and toss out the bad drive. Advice please. I will most likely take the Drobo offline until I get a new drive, is this okay to do.

What was the error message that you got?

 

[Guy Mancuso]

Replace drive 3. Hard drive failure. I put in a 500gb last night that I had sitting around at about 11 pm , it's 5 am here and it is still working to get everything squared up again. Hopefully soon I will get all green. Right now the three good drives are flashing green/yellow but no light on drive 3 and I think that won't come on until it is all squared up.

 

[ddk]

Replace drive 3. Hard drive failure. I put in a 500gb last night that I had sitting around at about 11 pm , it's 5 am here and it is still working to get everything squared up again. Hopefully soon I will get all green. Right now the three good drives are flashing green/yellow but no light on drive 3 and I think that won't come on until it is all squared up.

I've had bad luck with Maxtors too, I always replaced them with Seagates or IBMs when they used to have them, if they came with my computers.

The Dashboard should tell you how much longer to go with the rebuild, last time I replaced a drive it took a couple of days, good luck!

 

[Guy Mancuso]

Thanks David seems to be my case , taking forever.

 

[Georg Baumann]

I would not be worried about the lengthy time, I imagine it does a verify during the process which doubles the time required, but gives you security. Just a guess....

 

[Guy Mancuso]

Thanks Georg my nervous twitch is not stopping though until I see all green. NO patience at all.:ROTFL::ROTFL::ROTFL:

 

[Jack]

If you understand the complex storage strategy required for RAID-5 to work -- basically it is a structure of number of drives N x (N-1) matrix mathematics at the bit level -- then you start to understand what is going on and why Drobo takes longer to rebuild across an uneven array of drives than a dedicated RAID box takes to rebuild across an array of identical drives.

Bottom line is Drobo is a BACK-UP, the data is still there residing on it, AND it remains fully accessible during the rebuild! (Which BTW is NOT the case when most dedicated RAID arrays are rebuilding -- they are mostly offline during the rebuild.)

 

[Guy Mancuso]

I'm offline right now which is making me nervous but the drives are working it

 

[Georg Baumann]

Have a double vodka and leave the room. come cack in 10 minutes, if still red.... have another double..... come back after 10 minutes....

....continue procedure for 3 hours....

You will sleep nice and without worries! :ROTFL:

P.S.

If you start seeing 6 green and 2 red lights, stop procedure and go to sleep right away.

 

[Guy Mancuso]

Okay update called customer support got a very nice lady on the phone and basically i wasted about 12 hours of time , when I put the new 3rd drive in to replace I did not put the Drobo on standby so the red light never came on. So basically the Drobo got confused on what I did . Now after customer support and doing some unpluging the firewire and power all four drives are flashing green and yellow so the data is being moved around like it is supposed to. What I was getting was only the 3 drives going yellow and green flashing. So now all seems to be well and just have to wait it out for all to get back to normal and all turn green again.

I did ask about pulling the 500gb drive when the new 2TB drive comes next week. No problem just put in standby and switch them out and it should do what is going on now and get all stable again. This turns out more my fault by not puttting it in standby than the Drobo itself which is reassuring. Better in this case me being the idiot than the Drobo. :ROTFL:

Time to start drinking

 

[Guy Mancuso]

Looking at the controls i have about 40 minutes until all green again. My heart is still in standby