New Mac Mini, new Drobo (2nd Gen), HEADACHES!

[2002cbr600f4i]

Hoping somebody here has a solution for me...

I bought one of the new Mini's the first weekend they were out, so I'm obviously running Lion...

I picked up a 2nd Gen Drobo the other day to hook to the Mini so I can use as a mass storage device. I'm connected over FW800.

From the time I installed it all, the Drobo has been a MAJOR headache! On basically every file transfer, particularly large ones (10's of MB or more) the Drobo will drop connection with the Mini. I'll get a ton of messages in my console log:

(time) kernel: V1.4.0: TrustedData_driver_VendorSpecificType00::vendorSpecificPassThroughIn(): SendCommand failed, task not complete, serviceResponse = 1, TaskStatus: 2
(time) TrustedData_UserClient_SCSIType00::vendorSpecificPassThroughIn() returning failure from driver: 3758097084



The Drobo Dashboard won't find the Drobo, but OSX seems to think it's still there. No error lights on the Drobo either. The only way I can get it back is to power the drobo down and restart it.

Ideas??? I'm on Dashboard 2.0.4 and Firmware v 1.3.7 (both are the latest.)

 

[blevins321]

I abhore Drobo under any circumstance anyway. But one solution might be to reformat and NOT install the Drobo dashboard until they update it. Without the software your Mac should recognize it as a standard FireWire drive.

 

[nutmac]

Are you running Lion (I assume yes since you have the new Mini)? Drobo doesn't yet support Lion.

Here's Hal Mueller's experience with Drobo and Lion

 

[2002cbr600f4i]

According to their site they do... The 2.0.3 / 1.3.7 Dashboard/firmware is supposed to provide Lion support. Additionally, Hal's issues are with the FS model (which is attached via LAN) I have the plain Drobo (attached via Firewire). His issues are with the AFP support...

The annoying part is a buddy convinced me to get this, as he has the 2010 Mini with the same model Drobo, upgraded to Lion and it's working fine for him...

Not sure if it's a size of data being transfered or what issue... When I did some transfers last night in smaller batches it seemed to work fine. But then I set up a 130GB one from my mac pro (shared the drobo as a drive on the mini so the Pro could see it) it got 1/2 done and crapped out.

I just uninstalled the Drobo Dashboard software, rebooted, and then reinstalled it, and am going to do a manual install of the 1.3.7 firmware again, this time with it hooked up over USB to see if that works better.

Sigh...

 

[2002cbr600f4i]

Ok, knock on wood, so far so good. Using USB instead of FW (certainly slower, but I'm more interested in stability at this point) and the reinstall of the software SEEMS to be working better.

I've done a couple 10GB Xfers, a 21 and now I'm working on a 38GB one...

Really hoping it's going to work ok...

 

[2002cbr600f4i]

So far so good! No problems yet tonight... Probably thrown 200 GB onto it so far, and in the middle of a single 320GB transfer right now with no issues...

If everything goes well, then I'm going to try switching back to the Firewire interface and see how that goes.

 

[DustinT]

I'm using Firewire right now under Lion 10.7.1 and the last 600 gigs have gone fine. Of course, there's been Drobo and Lion updates in the last few weeks so thats probably why its working for me now.

 

[CWallace]

I purchased a new i7 iMac and a 2nd Gen Drobo with 4 Hitachi Green 2TB HDDs connected by FW800 and so far it's been fine. I wrote 4TB of data to it over three days from three WD MyBook 2TBs in the FW chain and it didn't barf on me.