The Drobo

A little of over a year ago I purchased a new camera, a Nikon D300. A camera I love so much, I started taking 10,000+ pictures a month. Major problems arisen from this because now I have 80+ Gig for images to store some where. My previous attempts failed miserably by mistakenly purchasing anything with the (WD) or Western Digital name on it. If you have one return it as fast as possible. When it comes to fast, scalable, reliable, and dependable internal and external hard drive WD is what NOT to do.

I had two of the WD MyBooks go down with in 2 weeks of each other. The second was new and what going to be the back up for the first but both started acting funny and became unresponsive and left all my beautiful images and designs from college trapped on them.

Oh but wait! Back up I forgot one part, The Drobo.

The Drobo is a product developed by US Data Robotics located in the Silicon Valley of Northern California. The Drobo is essentially a really smart hard drive. But that would be understating its potential. The Drobo allows it's users to purchase and install any SATA hard drive in any size or manufacturer for a current maximum of 4 - 2 Terabyte (TB) drives for and total of 5.5 TB of usable and supposed redundant safe data storage.

I did some weeks of research and found at the time Nov-Dec of 2008 that there was not other cost effective way to buy and maintain a scalable onsite data storage array. I found that the unit was pretty slow due to it's only interface USB 2.0, but the bad outweighed to good in this case so I went to MacWorld in January of 2008 and purchased to last Drobo and Drobo Share they had at their sales booth.



After taking it home I realized the I need some drives to install in it and they need to be big, fast, and reliable. So I went to amazon and purchased 5 1 TB Seagate Barracudas. This would max out the current capabilities of the Drobo and give me almost 3 TB of accessible storage for all my wonder and beautiful photos.

I received the drives I ordered slid them into their slots 1 - 4 and fired up the Drobo for the fist time. Then I proceeded to copy /back-up all the data was on my crappy and unstable WD drives I mentioned before.

Long Story Short(er) -
#00 (Jan 08) Drobo Purchased (Mar 09 - Put into service with 4 x 1 TB Seagate Barracuda SATA Hard Drives ($250 ea)
#01 (May 08) The Drobo had (1) drive failure within 3 months of putting the unit into service
#02 (Jun 08) The Drobo overheats and dies needing replacement ( Drobo #01 down)
#03 (Jun 08) The Drobo is back up and running just fine! (Drobo #02 delivered and Restored)
#04 (Jun 08) Data Robotics recognized that the Drobo has to faulty equipment and parts and offers a replacement (This is Drobo #02 down)
#05 (Jun 08) The Drobo is back up and running just fine! (Drobo #03 delivered and Restored)
#06 (Jun 08) The Drobo indicates the drive in the Slot #01 position at the top has failed and need replacement
#07 (July 08) The failed drive was replaced with the same quality part (1 TB Seagate Barracuda $250)

#08 (July 08) The Drobo failed to perform what is called a (Re-Layout), will not mount with the three remaining drives with 1.93 TB of data
#09 (Mar 09) The Drobo is back but does NOT mount and non of the Disc utilities purchased will fix it

• DiskWarrior 4.1.1 ($100) - Failed
• Data Rescue II ($100) - Failed
• Drive Genius ($100) - Failed
• Tech Tool Pro 4 ($100) - Failed

#10 (July 08) The Drobo melts down and dies (Takes 7 Months to finish diagnosis and get another Drobo sent to us)
#11 (Mar 09) Drobo is sent back for replacement again ( This is Drobo #03 down)
#12 (Mar 09) The Drobo is back but does NOT mount and non of the Disc utilities purchased will fix it

• DiskWarrior, Data Rescue II, Drive Genius, and Tech Tool Pro 4 all failed to recover, rebuild, or copy the compromised disks

• Hundreds of Disk Malfunctions (See Pic Below)

#13 (Apr 09) Additional Tech Support efforts after a few email exchanges and a conference calls with the VP of Customer Service and a Tier 3 Support Engineer
#14 (Apr 09) I just installed a Read-Only Drobo firm ware verson that will help stabilize my drobo enough to get the data off of it.
#15 (Apr 09) The Drobo back up and running be still will NOT mount but DiskWarrior is able to rebuild a preview of the Damaged / Corrupted Disk Image.

After rebuild I get this message from Diskwarrior:

"DiskWarrior has successfully built a new directory for the disk named "MediaStorage." The new directory cannot replace the original directory because of a disk malfunction. A disk malfunction is a failure of or damage to any mechanical component of the disk device, or any component connected to it. The malfunction will likely worsen. Therefore, recovering your files from the DiskWarrior Preview as quickly as possible is essential. It is highly recommended that you backup all of your data from the preview disk."









#16 It is Currently April 4th 2009 the Disk Image is still stable and we are attempting to transfer/back-up on folder 676.21 GB which the computer indicates will take between 425 to 3000+ house to complete. it is 5:53 AM and I am going to bed. We shall see what happen when we get back...

To Be continued...