I’ve mentioned before that I’ve had problems with my 2nd generation Drobo. I’m not the only one.
I have to say, Valorie in Drobo tech support did a great job handling my case. It seems that it may be a PSU problem (yes, just like my Lacie drives!). Both the Drobo and the Lacies come with cheap Chinese-made PSUs.
As you can see from the photo, it should be capable of outputting 6.7A at 12V. My multimeter said 12.36V, though I’ve no way of measuring the current draw when active. Drobo support said that the 1TB Hitachi Ultrastar HUA721010KLA330 drives are a known “power hog”. The drive itself states a current draw of 850mA (I have 2 installed, the other 2 are 750GB Seagate Barracuda ES ST3750640NS, with a stated draw of 520mA, so there could be some truth in that. If this is the case, I know from personal experience that it’s possible for multiple restarts to corrupt volume information resulting in data being lost.
They are sending me a new PSU, so we’ll know soon enough.
A while ago I bought a Drobo, the 2nd edition with Firewire 800 as I thought it’d be a nice way to get a could of TB of storage attached to the Mac Pro. A lot of people rave about the Drobo, but I’ve found it to be a disappointment. It seems like a great idea, but I’ve had problems with it.
Firstly, I had a few hundred GB of ISOs that I needed to off-load from some external drives (for temporary storage, I use and recommend the 1TB Samsung SpinPoint F DT HD103UJ, a nippy and (so far) reliable drive with a 3-platter array. Maximum PC has a good review. I combine it with with good looking and performant Icy Dock MB559UEB-1S-B, with USB2 and Firewire 800 interfaces. I moved the ISOs over to the Drobo, after some testing, and of course, after I’d deleted the ISOs from the external drive, the Drobo started playing up.
It would restart a few times a day, and then it would hang occasionally. After leaving it for a while, I’d always have to cycle the power by pulling the PSU lead out from the back. I’d opened a support ticket with Drobo when the thing stopped mounting.
Something clearly had become corrupt, as when I tried to mount the Drobo volume my Mac (both my Mac Pro and my Macbook Pro), would crash with the black screen. Not good. I used a combination of tools, including Data Rescue II, Techtool Pro, and Disk Warrior 4 – they couldn’t help. At this point I knew Drobo couldn’t help, and as the data was recoverable (albeit in a time-consuming way), I blatted the hardware and drives and put them in a factory default condition. I’ve upgraded the Firmware to v1.3.0, the dashboard to v1.2.4. and guess what, the damn thing is still restarting.
I’ve had it with consumer grade crap. I’m building a ZFS server.
No sooner had I wrote about my ReadyNAS 600 being without problems, the fan fails on me. As both the Infrant and Netgear stores didn’t have the replacement available, and after seeing the posts in this thread I looked at NewEgg and ordered the following:
SILVERSTONE RL-FX121 Case Fan – Retail
NewEgg Item#:N82E16835220002
It cost $16.59 (but about $20 to overnight). It’s a straight swap and fits perfectly.
