Tuesday
03Feb2009
Drobo Saga: The Resolution
Tuesday, February 3, 2009 at 04:38AM
The Drobo situation has been resolved. I had another call with Tom Loverro yesterday and we discussed the problem I mentioned yesterday:
Tom indicated to me that a Drobo should not behave this way and that there are two possible causes of this: a fault with the Drobo itself or a problem with one of the drives.
Yesterday, my replacement Drobo arrived. I pulled the drives from the original Drobo and put them into the new one and tried a couple of sleep/wake cycles. The new Drobo behaved just like any other disk - it went to sleep (lights off) when the Mac did, and woke up and reconnected correctly when the Mac woke. As you would expect, the data wasn't accessible until the drive was fully online but that's the same as any other external drive.
So, in summary, lessons learned, problem solved, Drobo replaced and Fraser happy. The Data Robotics team worked hard to make a bad situation right, and I thank them for that.
I do have one suspicion, though: I’ve noticed that when your machine goes to sleep for an extended period, the Drobo also goes to sleep. When the computer wakes up, it does so a lot faster than the Drobo and, as a result, Mac OS X throws up the "Device Disconnected" dialog that you see if you pull a USB drive too soon. That’s not usually a good thing.
Tom indicated to me that a Drobo should not behave this way and that there are two possible causes of this: a fault with the Drobo itself or a problem with one of the drives.
Yesterday, my replacement Drobo arrived. I pulled the drives from the original Drobo and put them into the new one and tried a couple of sleep/wake cycles. The new Drobo behaved just like any other disk - it went to sleep (lights off) when the Mac did, and woke up and reconnected correctly when the Mac woke. As you would expect, the data wasn't accessible until the drive was fully online but that's the same as any other external drive.
So, in summary, lessons learned, problem solved, Drobo replaced and Fraser happy. The Data Robotics team worked hard to make a bad situation right, and I thank them for that.
Reader Comments (8)
I'm resting easier, although I will be watching my units just in case.
that's the point: if the drobo or RAID5 enclosure is faulty you can't read your drives.
so why is drobo better than mirroring ? considering that price of storage is divided by 10 every 2 years, why would i need a headache hardware ?
with mirror raid1 , one would argue "what happens if your 2 drives fail" .... and with a drobo what would happen if 2 drives fail?
in my set up i need 3To to have a complete secure backup of 1To data= on site 2 mirrored drives of 1To and one offsite 1 To mirror disk.
i just try to convince myself this drobo is not for me cause it's quite expensive and i'm really not sure it will secure my datas that well. i'd rather have a solution where every disk is readable independently of the others.
Mine does the exact same thing! I'm glad you blogged about this. I've also been having similar difficulties with the Time Machine partition getting corrupted, but I've been ignoring it because it works most of the time. Guess I should call support.
Interesting. This situation really speaks to me about having a low tolerance for shit. That's something I'm working on in my own life. :)
I had that "device disconnected" problem all the time with a brand new Drobo and brand new drives in the one week that I owned it. This was one of the main reasons I returned it.
What would have happened if you weren't Fraser Speirs, master of things Mac & Flickr? Would DR's exec team have called you for a chat? Would anyone have noticed that it was your Drobo that was defective? Or would DR been content to just blame you?
I'm still spooked by this saga and a Drobo won't be high on my list of gadgetry to buy because of it.
And mine did today the exact same thing, on Windows 2003 R2 x64. I ended up re-formatting before I found this blog.
--Repost from the other thread--
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.