This being an update on the situation regarding my drobo potential trainwreck but also on updates to the drobo.
This morning as I ran out the door I took a quick glance at the drobo, and noticed that the lights that were flashing to warn me it was reorganising data had stopped flashing, and I had green lights across the board to indicate my data was safe again. Huge sigh of relief, stop panicking.
This afternoon while I was out for lunch with my colleagues, a surprising thing happened: Drobo Support called me to check on the situation following the feedback I left on two knowledge base articles, and the support ticket I’d raised. They’d even read my blog post, and wanted to make sure everything was ok. I asked them to call back in 30 minutes and even more amazingly, they did call back.
I explained on the phone that it looked like all was ok, but I would need to verify tonight. The support person explained that sometimes it can take up to 24 hours per terabyte of data to do the update, and that usually if there is a power failure part-way through the drobo should come back up cleanly. That’s useful information to know, and I suggested it be added to the knowledgebase so people like me don’t worry unnecessarily.
The other problem I was keen to tackle is figuring out whether my new drive did indeed have 4k sectors and whether I needed to update the firmware on the drobo or not. Since yesterday was the first time I’d plugged it into a host computer for over a year (rather than into the router), I wasn’t surprised to be prompted to do an upgrade, but held off until the data was secure.
This morning, browsing through the Drobo firmware update release notes, I came across this gem:
In accordance with industry best practices, you should always backup your data before any firmware upgrade.
Uh, yeah. Backing up 2TB of data? Theoretically possible, but liable to take quite a while on my broadband connection…
Of course Data Robotics are correct – and their best practices contain valuable information (as well as pimping Dropbox, another favourite of mine). Maybe I need to buy another Drobo, to back up the first?
I decided to proceed with the upgrade process anyway, as the Drobo calculator seemed to suggest I should have 5TB and not the 3.15TB I was seeing in the dashboard. The first update from 1.3.0 to 1.3.5 was smooth, with some pretty cool animation of the blue lights on the front of the device.
Unfortunately, after the drobo restarted from the first upgrade I was prompted for another one. I hate it when updates take place in multiple stages, especially when there’s no warning. It would be much nicer to at least know there would be multiple updates. To compound my irritation, when the Drobo restarted for the next update, it did not cleanly eject. This is not a happy message to see when you’re dealing with your valuable backup data:
With all the firmware updated, I was surprised to see reported capacity still only 3.15TB. Then I realised the subtle difference between the reporting in the pie chart screenshot at the top and the drobo calculator on the website:
The catch is the difference between “available for data” vs. “actual”. The “How is my storage being used” drop-down contains the real story:
It’s a bit silly that this isn’t consistently represented to the user up-front in the Drobo dashboard software just as it is in the website calculator, to prevent misunderstandings.
So I guess this story has a kinda-happy ending, in that my data is safe, my Drobo works fine, but I went through a nasty 48 hours over the weekend thinking about what-ifs and wasted some time due to quirky representation of information.
Here’s the thing. Given Drobo have my contact details (as demonstrated by the phone call), I’m surprised they aren’t emailing customers to warn them about the 4k sector and 3TB drive issues, to proactively remind us to update firmware and be careful what drives we buy. A happy customer is a forewarned customer who doesn’t receive nasty surprises from magic boxes that usually just work.
My feelings of joy at being to randomly plug drives in and out of this clever little box have given way to a general feeling of slight unease, never knowing what surprises it has in store for me next. And that’s a shame, because the drobo really is a quantum leap forward compared to external USB drives.
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