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Helpful warning to DROBO users...

bradhusick

Active member
I was doing some electrical work in the house. I managed to brick my Drobo S the other day when I cut the power from the breaker panel without shutting down the unit. I cycled it a few times in the space of a few minutes and the Drobo wouldn't boot. After buying a support plan ($250) they kindly replaced it. The data was fine and just swapping the drives into the new box worked fine, but it was a bit scary.

Lesson here: plug your Drobo into a UPS. And don't cut the power without a proper shutdown.
 

Jack

Sr. Administrator
Staff member
Wow. Thanks for sharing this one. The more I hear, the less enamored I am with DROBO...
 

Jorgen Udvang

Subscriber Member
Welcome to the club. I killed one monitor, one of the monitor interfaces on a Mac Mini (luckily, that particular model has two) and the USB card on my printer just by pulling the monitor plug. What I've learned later is that this can happen easily with American style plugs, since the pins are all metal. If the plug is pulled or inserted slowly, a spark can go between the pins, creating a short circuit. English plugs with pins that are plastic nearest the plug and with a built-in fuse are the safest, but the new European three-pin plugs are also good. Since I live in a country with no particular standard (used to be American), I've changed to safer plugs on all computer and camera related gear.
 

ustein

Contributing Editor
>I managed to brick my Drobo S

Drobo and also other RAIDs (Raid 5) have the following problem. And I experienced it.

Lets start with a normal disk on Mac. If it gets bad you can use Disk Warrior to recover it. Disk Warrior talks at lower levels to the disk OS.

Now Drobo. If it gets bad Disk Warrior would be able to recover all but not repair because it is not talking to the disk OS but Drobo instead. Not sure this can also happen to other Raids though. Have a OWC Raid for 3 years and it works (but has loud fans).

With 3TB on disks I don't see a need for raid much.

Speed: Raid 0 is fine if you have good backup

Backup: Raid 5 is not a backup strategy but and availability option. I use mirroed single disks to keep me running.
 

Don Libby

Well-known member
I've got 3-USPs in the studio so everything is covered. I did however leave Drobo behind earlier this year and opted instead for G-Technology. I have a G-Safe for travels and local backup and a G-Speed for RAID.
 

bradhusick

Active member
It's nice to know that if any of the 5 drives fail the data is safe. And drives do fail. I use another Drobo as a backup to the first, leaving it unplugged most of the time and doing this once a month. The Drobo is also backed up online every day using Crashplan. Belt and suspenders.
 

TRSmith

Subscriber Member
I second the idea of using UPS instead of simple power strip. I have two running all the time since I live in an area that has frequent power blips. I suggest careful shopping however, I've had no less than three UPS units that have gone bad.

The best ones simply sit under your desk and give you time to do a proper shut down during a power outage but are otherwise silent. I recently had to return one since it had an annoying habit of running a loud fan for several hours after even the tiniest interruption of power.
 
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