Today I was dealing with hard drive issues on my Drobo. I own both a Drobo and a Drobo2. I thought I was having issues with my mac-mini running Snow-Leopard Server. The boot drive was my Drobo2 on Firewire. It was running fine in the beginning, but got worse over time. Finally this system started crawling to a halt.
I received a red-warning light on my Drobo and of course I replaced the drive. Then my Drobo tells me that it will take 143 hours to recover. I figure the problem is the drive I replaced it with (WD green, which are known to have issues) so I grabbed a Seagate drive and put that in, but received the same message. I have four 500gig drives in this unit, so it should take no more than about 24 hours (or less). The same drives in my Tivo Raid array take about 8 hours to sync.
So, I think it’s time to retire his drobo units. I am not an isolated incident. Apparently, this is so well known on the net that some have talked about a class action lawsuit to get their money back or at least upgraded to the newer version that the company says fixes all these problems. These units didn’t come cheap and I, as a consumer, will not shell out another $500+ to upgrade in the hopes that this will fix the problem. I use my Drobos as centralized storage that is shared out to both AFP and CIFS. I will not use their DroboShare, because that is the biggest piece of carp (sic) ever produced in the last 10 years.
So, I think I will go back to traditional raid-1/5 systems. I really like the raid array I have for my Tivo. The only bright side to this entire headache is my data is still there, it just takes 24 hours to copy a few gigs off the dang thing. I have been looking at the ReadyNAS NV+/Pro but I am thinking, “I never had an issue when running Solaris, not a single one”. So I think I will invest in eSata arrays and a decent low-power PC that has a decent amount of memory. I can then retire my mac Mini and my HP desktop. The only requirement is that I be able to support AFP volumes and TimeMachine shares.