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Tuesday
Feb032009

Drobo Saga: The Resolution

DateTuesday, 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:

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.
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Reader Comments (30)

I'm resting easier, although I will be watching my units just in case.

February 3, 2009 | Unregistered CommenterGeof F. Morris

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.

February 3, 2009 | Unregistered Commenterolivier

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.

February 3, 2009 | Unregistered CommenterDaniel

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. :)

February 3, 2009 | Unregistered CommenterSteven Fisher

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.

February 3, 2009 | Unregistered Commenterhkk

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.

February 3, 2009 | Unregistered CommenterMarc

And mine did today the exact same thing, on Windows 2003 R2 x64. I ended up re-formatting before I found this blog.

February 4, 2009 | Unregistered Commentertw

--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.

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

@olivier

Drobo is better than mirroring simply because, even with the huge hard drives we have today mirroring is horrendously wasteful.

In certain environments where ultimate performance and data accessibility are key, mirroring, or striping with no parity across multiple mirror sets (often referred to as RAID 10) is certainly justifiable.

But not for me at home. I have tons of video - from really well done video podcasts, video I shoot to video I pull off of my Tivo's - I couldn't afford mirroring for all that data! And then photography... while not as bad as video, it's still nothing to sneeze at - I may actually have to give up managed libraries in Aperture and move to referenced. Then again with Aperture 3's ability to effortlessly move between libraries, probably not :)

The point is, Drobo plugs - and will continue to plug - a very valuable hole. As for your comment about accessing your data - if you notice, he took his drives from one Drobo, put them in another and they came right up. You don't even have to put them in the same slots. That's a device DONE RIGHT! The engineers on the back end PAID ATTENTION TO DETAIL and just didn't chuck the product out the door.

I am positively salivating over the Drobo Pro and Drobo Elite for some upcoming projects I'll be involved with for some non-profits because Drobo will present them storage options that were previously only available on really high end (and expensive!) enterprise SAN solutions. For what it does, the Drobo Elite is an absolute steal and shouldn't be overlooked or discounted.

If your storage needs are at a point where mirroring works for you - congratulations. i am honestly jealous since I do firmly believe in all the advantages of mirroring that you point out. When you need more, I am very happy there is a company like Drobo out there redefining the status quo in storage arrays. They are a great company and their philosophy of "storage for the rest of us" should be applauded, even if you don't need it. As someone who has dealt with offerings like EMC, Hitachi and NetApp over the past 15 years, for the lower end of the market Drobo is a breath of much needed fresh air. And if you need something more than Drobo, take a strong look at Dell/Equallogic - I bought my first Equallogic SAN years before Dell aquired them and it was the best piece of storage technology I have ever worked with. Once everything was racked and powered on, I had a fully functional SAN with 20 terabytes of useable storage spread over four units fully configured, with a volume created, mounted and formatted in my server in less than 20 minutes - truly astonishing! If I could justify the cost for one at my house I would have one at home :) With the new units with 10gig ethernet interfaces, I think they are going to be giving the traditional guys clinging to fibre channel a REAL run for their money.

Exciting times!

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