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Wednesday
Jan282009

Drobo: Its Part In My Downfall

DateWednesday, January 28, 2009 at 9:43PM
[Update 2008-02-03: read the resolution to this story.]

[Update 2008-01-31: Before you read further, you should be aware that Data Robotics have repudiated everything that their tech support operative said in this thread. Repeat: literally everything that the support op says here is wrong. It is absolutely OK to pull the FireWire cable after unmounting the volumes. Read the followup post.]

I've owned a Drobo for a few months now. This supposed wonder-device has been nothing but trouble. It sounds like a great idea, doesn't it, to have a unit that you can just up-size the drives in on a rolling basis. Unfortunately, in my experience, it's simply not up to scratch.

In particular, I've intermittently experienced a problem with my Drobo where it will fail to mount either of the two volumes on the device. This is what happens:


  • The unit boots up as normal.
  • The four bay lights are steady green, suggesting no problems.
  • The capacity meter shows the expected level of use.
  • Drobo Dashboard can see that there is a unit connected, and reports the correct free space and used space. It also correctly reports the capacity of each drive in each bay, but instead of showing the volume names it says "Unlabeled".
  • Disk Utility sees the device, but no volumes.
  • The drives are constantly thrashing.


The last time this happened, I let it grind away overnight and eventually the volumes came back. Unfortunately this time it seems like nothing will do the trick, so I decided to open a case with Drobo support.

Here is the thread in full, starting with Drobo's reply after I sent them the details above:

Drobo

Hello Fraser Speirs,

Thanks for contacting Drobo tech support.

Question:
My Mac is reporting my Drobo as "Unlabeled". What could cause this?

Answer:
This is a result of the host computer system damaging the file system on Drobo. This is usually from the user improperly disconnecting one of Drobo's cables without first shutting down the computer or putting Drobo to standby using the Drobo Dashboard. Please run file system repair utilities like the Apple Utilities Disk repair, or Alsoft's Disk Warrior, or Tech Tool (free with AppleCare). Disk Warrior and Tech Tool require you to connect the Drobo via USB directly to a port on the back of the computer and boot from the given utilities CD.


Thanks for your time,
Drobo Tech Support - JB


Me

Thanks for the reply. My regular disconnection procedure, which I
follow pretty religiously, is to unmount the volumes on the Drobo,
then pull the FireWire cable. Is this wrong? It was my understanding
that this was the 'manual' standby procedure for people who don't run
Drobo Dashboard.

Can you tell me if a Drobo has any capacity thresholds after which it
does some reorganisation behind the scenes? The last time I saw this
happen was the last time my Drobo hit 80% full.

Thanks,
Fraser


Drobo

Hello Fraser Speirs,

Thanks for contacting Drobo tech support.

If you do not run Drobo Dashboard you will need to shutdown the computer Drobo is connected to before removing cables. Simply ejecting does not put Drobo to standby (orange power light only all others off).

Drobo only reorganizes at 50%. At 80% full the Drobo will just constantly slow down just as all drives due past 80%. To keep Drobo at full performance keep the Drobo at 79% full or less.


Me

Thanks for the reply. This is unfortunate since your advice contradicts the following Drobo document:

http://www.drobo.com/pdf/Drobo-2ndGen-Help_for_Mac.pdf

..which says:

"always properly put Drobo into Standby Mode by safely ejecting your Drobo first. You can do this by dragging the Drobo drive icon from your desktop to the Trash, locating the Drobo icon in the Finder and choosing Eject from the file menu, or clicking on the Standby button located on the Tools Tab of the Advanced Controls Panel" (p22)

That section of the help document says _nothing_ about shutting down the Mac before disconnection. It's really disappointing to have to go and spend a speculative $100 to see if I can get my data back, despite having followed your documentation _to the letter_.

Is there any possibility that the Drobo will recover itself from this? The hard drives sound like they are constantly active. Is it repairing itself?

Fraser


Drobo

Hello Fraser Speirs,

Thanks for contacting Drobo tech support.

1) I will put up a request to have this document edited.

2) Drobo should not be the only location the data is stored on. Drobo is meant to be a primary or backup location. not both.

3) Drobo can only recover from most hardware error. And improper disconnections are considered user error.

Thanks for your time,
Drobo Tech Support - JB


Let me summarise that for you:

"Our documented disconnection procedure will silently corrupt your Drobo. Sorry about that. Hope you have a backup. Also: YOUR FAULT, despite you doing what we said to do."


Fortunately, I do have a backup of the critical things on my Drobo. Unfortunately, I don't think I can trust this device any longer. I'll probably continue to use it for non-critical things - perhaps on my media centre Mac mini as an rsync cache of my iTunes library - but it's hard to have any confidence in the device now. For now, I'm going to move the unit to my Mac Mini and let it thrash away for as long as it wants to see if it will eventually recover itself once more.

Lots of my Twitter friends insist that they've been running Drobos for years on end without a single issue. I don't know if I just have a bad unit or not, since Drobo Support seems intent on blaming my error for this problem.

I'm not writing this primarily to embarrass Data Robotics, Inc. People need to know that their documentation contains a critical data-destroying error.
in

Reader Comments (41)

I think Data Robotics tried to do the right thing. Don't snag all over them because one guy was inept and has zero customer service skills.

January 30, 2009 | Unregistered CommenterFred

Fred, I absolutely second this!

And what I don't get is this idea that the Drobo is expensive. Considering what it does it is certainly one one the cheaper soltuions on the market (And anyone who suggests to just connect a ton of USB drives and use Software-RAID is just plainly retarded).

Also consider this article: http://www.tuaw.com/2009/01/30/working-with-a-robot-drobo-in-action/

January 30, 2009 | Unregistered CommenterStefan

I had similar issues. Often, the Drobo would fail to mount, or would go into an infinite reboot loop. A few days ago, it decided to rebuild the whole structure. Took two days, and in the end, my data was gone. The Drobo is a neat idea, and it's beautiful if it works, but if it doesn't work, having all that redundant data means nothing if it's held hostage in a proprietary system you can't fix.

January 31, 2009 | Unregistered CommenterLKM

I own a FW drobo and gave up on all its noise, (disk thrashing and fan noise is insane), data corruption (my drobo LOVED to create duplicate copies of my data and fill itself up almost daily) and have resorted to backing up my data to duplicate internal hard drives. (I have a Mac Pro with 4 drive bays). I still own the drobo, but it sits in a closet.

I use Super Duper to do a basic daily mirror of both my main boot and second music/movies disks to matching 500GB WD Green and 1TB WD Green hard drives respectfully.

Now, my office is whisper quiet (Mac Pros are overall remarkably quiet) and I can now think.

Anyone out there thinking about the drobo, I would say take a pass on it. With the "owners only" forum access, noisy operation, and overall crappy customer service, holding out for a commercial ZFS implementation or a home grown ZFS setup would be a better choice.

January 31, 2009 | Unregistered CommenterCG

Nat,

The throttling starts at 95%.

Instead of refusing to copy files when its capacity is almost full (over 95%), Drobo instead enters “slow down” mode to alert you to check the blue capacity meter. If all ten blue lights are lit, it’s time to add capacity.

January 31, 2009 | Unregistered CommenterRalph Herbst - Data Robotics

hi everyone, interesting discussion.

1/ just want to say that RAID IS NOT A BACKUP SOLUTION!!!!
RAID is here to reduce downtime of a service that involve storage of data. that's all. relying on lacieRAID or DROBO as a backup is NUTS!!!!!
so if storage is used for photography or video, RAID is not suited. RAID is suited for data servers.

2/ rebuilding a Lacie raid or a drobo raid in case of hardware failure is AS complex...don't expect to pull your drives out of the faulty lacie box and rebuild the array in a different box with a different raid controller ....even if it's a standard raid5....like with a drobo failure you will have to buy an other lacie box.

i would buy a drobo in a second if they provide a software that will allow me to read my datas from my drobo disks when i mount them directly in 4 sata bays on my macpro in case of drobo failure. who can live without it's data during an ordering-shipping of a new drobo case period?

No matter what , the backup question is a real problem.

at home, i have a working drive, a backup drive (that i only switch on during the backup process) and i have a clone backup drive that i store in a different place.

one thing to remember : all day spinning drive means high failure rate. all day disconnected drive means really low failure rate.

for data backup i really prefer a RAID1 array that i only switch on for backups...with raid1 i'm sure every disk of the array is readable independently. i choose different brand disk for my array to avoid 'synchronized failure'.

just my 2 cents

January 31, 2009 | Unregistered Commenterhangon

After reading all these responses, It made me think of a couple of things:

1. Drobo's have Apple Aesthetics, I love how that thing looks... *I want one*.

2. If I am not wrong, Steve Jobs once said, "Technology is not an exact science, people still develope it", Very true that your 1st experience with Drobo was crappy, but you did draw a lot of attention from their Top Chief's, a public apology from their CEO, and u still have not explained how it got fixed in the end. Which makes me think this thread is just intended to drive their advertsing to the ground just because you had one tiny boo-boo...

And for thouse of you who are counting...

3. If you want a really powerful NAS Raid solution... I got you this...

Grab a VW Beetle, thrown a microPC with a bunch of drives (like 20) use opensolaris and ZFS and you got the worlds largest mobile raid array.

If you get creative you can figure how to ake it work with your network.

PS. I dont own a drobo, dont work for data robotics and i still think i will buy one even after your experience...

=)

January 31, 2009 | Unregistered CommenterGilbert Palau

I would strongly suggest, based on my personal experience with Drobo support, that Drobo fire JB as soon as possible. This person has led to another blog post, which I will not point to, but have seen, and my own frustrations.

February 2, 2009 | Unregistered CommenterAnonymous

As a small Apple Authorized Reseller we work with a base of small businesses or home users that need a "less then expensive" storage solution. These are the folks who have 3 or 4 fw/usb drives connected to their machine. They aren't IT pros. But they call us knowing what they are doing is going to get them in trouble or already has. They don't have the money to buy a Promise Raid and with a little supervision/management they can make lower cost devices work well *enough*.

We have been selling Drobo units to our clients for the better part of a year. While they are not perfect, they do fill a role. That role is NOT to be a 10 bay fiber JBOD unit with rapid onsite service in 4 hours. It is, however, a prosumer storage solution designed for people who don't care how to restripe a raid array (or pay someone to maintain such a creature). I don't work with dumb people - But they also don't want to learn how to do raid maintenance, either. They want a storage unit that they can look at and say "Yup, green means good." Then they turn away and focus on making some money in their business or go play with their kids.

If you look at the Drobo as a raid, it will fail your expectations. It is raid-like. Say it with me.. raid-like. With ease of use this unit will allow for certain failures to be corrected easily. Remember, this isn't for the ubergeek, it's for "Fred's Photography Studio" and the like. As for the complaint about speed, we don't see it (but then we don't suggest it for speed, either). Of course we don't sell this to people that have Final Cut rigs that need more working scratch space. We would, however, sell it to them if they need to archive video, though.

As far as technical support goes - I am on the phone every other day with phone support for products that we service, install or sell. I've never had a problem with the Drobo team. But on the other hand, we haven't had to call them but maybe %3-5 of our installed base. (One was for a damaged delivery)

Failures in storage happen. You look for a trend on products to see if there is a bad egg in the line up. I haven't seen it here and I deal with storage products everyday. A couple of posts to the world wide whine doesn't mean the product is bad. It just means that this person's issue got noticed.

And no they didn't call me and ask me to post this nor does Data Robotics pay me. Our client base trusts us and wouldn't do business with MacSouth again if we failed them. I don't have to suggest Drobo as a solution to my customers. But I will - Because I like the unit. And for the price (and the right situation) you can't beat it.

February 5, 2009 | Unregistered CommenterJoel Crawford -Owner of MacSou

I'm sorry you had problems with your Drobo, and indeed, the tech support interaction wasn't ideal. But those commenters who said "I was going to get a Drobo, but now I'm not..." are just being silly. Have you ever read MacFixIt.com after a Mac OS X upgrade? "DO NOT INSTALL 10.5.x!!! IT DESTROYS YOUR MACHINE PERMANENTLY!!!" etc etc. My point? THe author had a bad experience with one unit and a support person. It happens. My Drobo is running fine. I am a Mac consultant, and setup up and install hardware all the time for clients. Sometimes you get a bad unit of any product, sometimes you run into an idiot support person, and yes, sometimes both.

For the most part, I second Joel Crawford's comment. Drobo fill a role, does it pretty well, and don't believe that any device is infallible, and get the right tool for the right job.

February 5, 2009 | Unregistered CommenterDouglas

same problem different day... =(

http://www.refracted-light.com/blog/2010/1/23/my-first-30days-with-drobo-s.html

March 29, 2010 | Unregistered CommenterStu Hodgkiss

I'm having problems with my 2nd Generation 4 Bay Drobo as well. My 4 month old MacBook Pro took a @#!$% on me so I had to take it in to get my data off the HDD before sending it back to Apple. I took it to a tech along with Drobo which has 2-1TB HDD contained within. The tech filled up Drobo with only 1% of free space left. I wish he would have alerted me to that, I would have certainly put more hard drives in it. Now when I hook it up to my new MacBook Pro it freezes up everything. It even causes Finder to fail (error: -10810). Even though I'm showing Drobo in Finder, my computer doesn't know it's there. These units will not work if they're too full. In all fairness to Drobo, Snow Leopard is having issues with external drives.Thanks Apple. Thanks Drobo. They've partnered up at putting a serious dent in my wallet as well as sabotaging my work and years of data. Brrrrf.

May 29, 2010 | Unregistered CommenterFelicity

In the past month now, I've had 2 Drobo S units go into 'infinite reboot loop' and have had to return them both. I own 2 other 2nd gen Drobo units and have not had problems with those, but as someone who was really in love with the simplicity of these backups, I can say that I'll never buy another Drobo. I have 4 of these and use them in our small design business, but I can't afford to lose data or have to return these Drobo S units (which also have very poor eSATA functionality) ever couple of months when they decide to perpetually reboot.

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January 8, 2011 | Unregistered CommenterEd Hardy

I had a similar experience to Chris. I have had two original Drobo units. The first one failed without losing data and the second one lost all the data. The first failure was days after purchase so I returned it to Amazon. The second unit worked for a few months until it wouldn't mount any longer.

Tech support was terrible after the first failure. I kept calling and getting an answering service who took my number, but no one called back. After nearly a week of repeated calls and no call-backs I tracked down their corporate office number and finally spoke to someone who confirmed that the unit was dead.

Finally, I have to point out that the performance was terrible as well. Backing up 500GB took days. I replaced the failed Drobo with a mainstream RAID NAS which does back-ups in a fraction of the time.

I understand some people really like Drobo. Maybe the newer units are much better, but I won't be considering them ever again.

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