Drobo: is it the coolest piece of hardware you could ever buy, or a trainwreck waiting to happen? I’ve been living with mine for almost two years now, so it’s time to report.
The basic premise of the Drobo is pretty good. It’s a fancy container for hard disks, with the advantage that you can plug in several disks at once, of any capacity, and the Drobo takes care of mirroring and protecting your data. It’s easiest to watch the Drobo Demo Video to get a quick overview. As an unintentional collector of external USB hard drives, the opportunity to consolidate drives in one box AND to get protection from individual drive failure is a major selling point for me.
I’ve been pretty unremittingly positive about my Drobo ever since I got it, telling everyone that would listen to go out and get one. The shiny black plastic finish, glowing lights and reassuring hum all inspire confidence in the security and accessibility of your data.
The ability to use OEM disks is a big selling point: they are cheaper than buying drives with enclosures, and easy enough to get hold of. I always have the disk that represents the next jump up in size in my Amazon basket under “Saved Items — To Buy Later”. Whenever the price changes between purchases, Amazon gives me an update on the new price, so I can easily keep track and wait until the price hits the right GB/£ point before buying.
As an early adopter, I have the humble Drobo
I started out with two 1TB drives
I’d been meaning to upgrade the original 1TB drives to 3TB drives
On the one hand the delay only means 3TB drives will be cheaper by the time I can update my Drobo’s firmware and buy them. On the other hand, with ever month slipped I run the increased risk of having to replace one of my drives with a smaller capacity than I’d prefer, with a forced intermediate increment in storage.
Still, as long as my drives don’t fail, I can just wait for the firmware update, right?
Murphy’s Law. On Thursday night, one of the drive bays started flashing red, to indicate the disk had failed. I swiftly ordered a new 2TB drive to replace it, and it showed up yesterday morning, so I immediately pulled out the dead drive and plugged the new drive in. I watched as the usage fell from close to 100% to around 70% as the new drive space came online (5TB usable, yeah!), and then as all the Drobo drives started flashing green and orange to indicate my data was being moved around to keep it safe. The nice thing is that during this process, my data remains accessible.
I started to think about the congratulatory blog post I would write about how Drobo’s wonderful device had not only saved all my data in the face of a drive failure, but was also so incredibly simple to use.
Not so fast. It turns out there’s a pretty grim problem with the Drobo.
It’s now more than 24 hours since I inserted the new drive, and the Drobo is still flashing green and orange to indicate it’s reorganising my data. I was getting seriously worried, as I couldn’t hear a huge amount of disk activity. There’s also dire warnings on the Drobo website about ensuring the device stays on during this process. 24 hours seems like an awful long time to risk a power failure.
I yanked the USB cable out of the Airport Extreme and plugged my laptop into the Drobo so I could run the Drobo utilities (which don’t work over the network with the original Drobo). The first thing I noticed was that it saw all my drives, and that it estimated another 21 hours to complete the reorganisation. Well, fair enough, it is several terabytes of data after all. Then I noticed something odd:
The storage capacity is only 3.15TB, which is approximately what the calculator suggests I should have without the new 2TB drive in place.
This leaves me with a problem. According to Data Robotics, they recommend leaving the drobo on during the reorganisation process. There’s also a cryptic note on their website about using “4k sector” hard drives in the Drobo, which requires a firmware update. Unfortunately I only just discovered this information.
So now I’m faced with a problem. Do I risk shutting down the Drobo, yanking all the drives, and upgrading the firmware? Do I need to find somewhere to store 2TB of data while I sort out the Drobo? I’ve emailed Drobo support, so let’s hope they reply before I have a power cut or the other drives die due to excessive thrashing.
It’s a rather disappointing end to a perfect “it just works” technology story. To go from being able to arbitrarily plug drives in and out with no loss of data to a 24 hour wait for stability, a firmware update that’s months overdue, and having to hunt through the drobo forums for hints on a mysterious 4k sector limitation is far from satisfactory.
Here’s hoping that I manage to rescue my terabytes of data without a data loss train wreck.
Update 2011-03-14: see Drobo updates. Problem solved(ish), with no data loss. Hurrah!
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Hi there – I’ve had the same issue. It took ages, I think more than 36 hours, for it to rebuild. Never yank anything out, just let it do its work. I’m thinking of getting a 5-bay Drobo as one of my drives, with 4X2Tb, is now almost full…