Drobo 5D Issue - Killing my drives?

[Achiever]

I have been using a Drobo 5D, attached to my iMac, for a number of years to house a large iTunes media collection (~8TB). From the time I purchased it, there were 5 4TB Western Digital drives in there, which ran flawlessly for years. A couple of months ago, I started having some issues with the Drobo, and one day the drive in the second bay started flashing yellow, then red, indicating it was bad. Drobo rebuilt the system (RAID) and then the drives in the second and third bays were both red and in need of changing. Drives fail, no problem.

I ordered 2 new 10TB Seagate Ironwolf NAS drives and changed out the 2 failed WD ones. Drobo rebuilt and everything seemed fine, but a couple of days later, the drive in bay 2 turned red again, indicating an issue with one of the new Seagate HDs. A bad run of luck, but HDs fail, so I switched it out with Seagate and they provided a replacement HDD.

All was good for about 2 weeks and suddenly Drobo started showing me red error messages again for both the second and third drive bays, meaning BOTH Seagate HDDs had failed. The odds that all 3 Seagate Drives had failed so quickly seems pretty small, and the likelihood that HDs in the same 2 bays of that Drobo were failing makes the odds even smaller and makes me suspect that there is an issue with the Drobo mores than the drive. But, I am not sure if something like can can be troubleshooted, or if it means the Drobo has a larger issue? I welcome any and all thoughts.

 

[velocityg4]

If drives keep failing. I'd expect there's a power supply issue. Have you checked the voltages coming from the SATA power headers?

 

[Achiever]

If drives keep failing. I'd expect there's a power supply issue. Have you checked the voltages coming from the SATA power headers?

I have not checked voltages coming from the SATA power headers, mainly because I do not know what that means or how to do that. Any guidance?

Since you mention the power supply, though, about a year or 18 months ago, my power brick/cable failed and I got what was supposed to be a compatible replacement for it. The Drobo works, but since the brick and power cable were replaced, it occasionally won't mount onto the computer and, if the computer is on but the Drobo is off, and I power on the Drobo, the computer will shut down completely. Also, even when it was mounted, launching the AppleTV app to play a purchased and downloaded movie or TV show would give me a beach ball and Application not responding unless I rebooted the whole machine. None of that ever used to happen with the original power supply.

I figured that the new power brick/cable weren't completely up to snuff, but I never would have related it to the drive issue. I guess because it was limited to the same two bays and it didn't start happening until much later than the power supply started being used.

 

[velocityg4]

I have not checked voltages coming from the SATA power headers, mainly because I do not know what that means or how to do that. Any guidance?

Since you mention the power supply, though, about a year or 18 months ago, my power brick/cable failed and I got what was supposed to be a compatible replacement for it. The Drobo works, but since the brick and power cable were replaced, it occasionally won't mount onto the computer and, if the computer is on but the Drobo is off, and I power on the Drobo, the computer will shut down completely. Also, even when it was mounted, launching the AppleTV app to play a purchased and downloaded movie or TV show would give me a beach ball and Application not responding unless I rebooted the whole machine. None of that ever used to happen with the original power supply.

I figured that the new power brick/cable weren't completely up to snuff, but I never would have related it to the drive issue. I guess because it was limited to the same two bays and it didn't start happening until much later than the power supply started being used.

SATA to molex adapter. Then power on with a drive removed. Check with a multimeter.

I’d probably also check the AC outlet and power brick voltages.

If you added anything new to the house that has a high surge (like a compressor). I’d check for surge problems in your house. When it flicks on. Such as lights dimming or getting really bright for a moment.

If you can't find any power problems. I'd probably ditch the Drobo rather than keep frying drives.

 

[Middleman-77]

Looking at your issue there’s a possibility it could be to do with your power supply brick. I’ve been a Drobo 5D users for years too (own 2 x Drobo 5Ds and a Drobo 5c) and in my experience they are highly reliable drives as I’ve hardly had any issue in recent years. If there is an issue it could be either firmware related, drive reliability related or Thunderbolt cable related. I’ve had to replace a few TB cables before when I had trouble reading from my Drobo in the past. And I had one firmware issue last year related to the Drobo Dashboard app which was resolved by Drobo support.

However I do also know that if the drives are not regularly switched on you may get some sort of data loss over time using say RAID 5 algorithms. Which is why I suggest to users to use RAID 6 instead in such builds. Also I suggest try to leave the drive on as constant powering on/off may also affect the logic board circuitry.

One other thing you can also check is see if you can run the Mac utility DiskWarrior and check if the directory data is intact and not corrupted. There’s a chance the directory table corrupted leading to the two Seagate drives to fail.

If anything it maybe a good idea to try and copy and export the Drobo data over to another large drive and then reformat the Drobo, recopy the data over and see if that helps.

 

[Achiever]

As a quick post-script to this dilemma, I couldn't troubleshoot the issue, but since Drobo as a company seems to be on its way out and unlikely to be able to offer support or maintain compatibility with macOS going forward, I simply copied the media onto a large attached Western Digital HD as a stopgap to another RAID solution. It provides a decent temporary solution as no drives are being killed, and the data is transferred.

The issue I am now encountering on all of the transferred data is what I described above: anything which was copied from one drive to another causes a beach ball and the TV app to freeze up when I try to play it. The only work around has been to delete the download and have it re-downloaded. This has worked with purchased TV content. I am seeking a better option for the Movie files as there are nearly 5TB of data that I do not want to have to manually delete and then re-download.

I would add that this only happened on iTunes purchased content (ripped files a non-issue) and that I am directing the TV app to the new external HD, so there is no problem locating the file. Thoughts?

 

[xraydoc]

As a quick post-script to this dilemma, I couldn't troubleshoot the issue, but since Drobo as a company seems to be on its way out and unlikely to be able to offer support or maintain compatibility with macOS going forward, I simply copied the media onto a large attached Western Digital HD as a stopgap to another RAID solution. It provides a decent temporary solution as no drives are being killed, and the data is transferred.

The issue I am now encountering on all of the transferred data is what I described above: anything which was copied from one drive to another causes a beach ball and the TV app to freeze up when I try to play it. The only work around has been to delete the download and have it re-downloaded. This has worked with purchased TV content. I am seeking a better option for the Movie files as there are nearly 5TB of data that I do not want to have to manually delete and then re-download.

I would add that this only happened on iTunes purchased content (ripped files a non-issue) and that I am directing the TV app to the new external HD, so there is no problem locating the file. Thoughts?

Run Disk Utility on the external drive with all your files and let it do a check. Perhaps the copy produced file permissions errors that is tripping up the TV app.

 

[Achiever]

Run Disk Utility on the external drive with all your files and let it do a check. Perhaps the copy produced file permissions errors that is tripping up the TV app.

This was a good suggestion which, unfortunately, did not solve the problem.

 

[Pilotmacuser]

I have the same problem with my Drobo 5D3. I've had many drives fail. I just replaced a failed drive, the other 4 were fine, once it rebuilt the new drive I had another red flashing drive, which was fine the day before. I reformatted one of the failed drives in a PC and it works fine on its own, I then tried to use that same reformatted failed drive in the Drobo and it did not like it, flashed red. I think there's major hardware flaws with this Drobo. This is my second one, first one failed completely and was replaced under warranty.