Personal

Drive failed in my White MacBook, upgrading to 500GB

The drive failed today. Clicking sound on booting it. I pulled the drive and mounted it on my iMac which has the excellent ThermalTake BlacX external USB drive enclosure. Luckily, I seem to be able to use the Disk Utility to create a disk image of the failed drive. I know, I don't understand but I have an image now. I bought a new WD Scorpio Blue 500Gb drive in Best Buy for 107 bucks tax included. I then inserted the new 500GB drive in the iMac using the BlacX and then used disk utility to create a single partition 500Gb drive on it. I'm using superduper right now to copy and expand the image file I made earlier to the new drive and then it should be boot up in the MacBook.

SuperDuper is paying for itself pretty easily at this point. My favorite disk utility. But, I did notice something I can't explain yet. I initially backed up the old drive using superduper and created a sparse bundle but I was unable to select this as the image to copy to the new drive. This is why I then used disk utility to make an image again. I'm not sure how useful a sparse bundle image is for this kind of work but it doesn't look useful at all after this experience.

The new drive is installed in the macbook now and everything seems fine. So, the sequence was to use disk utility on the iMac to make a disk image for the 'failed' drive on the main disk. Then superduper copied the disk image to the 500GB new drive and it's working.

Drobo and me, a year later; review

UPDATE: A year and a week later, my perspective is even more negative on the Drobo. See here.

I've had my 2nd gen Drobo for about a year now. It's been up and down from how I feel about the product. I wanted to use it with my iMac and the media drive with all the photos/movies/itunes etc on it. That was the goal. We'd gotten a HD camcorder and would be needing a lot of disk space and lets face it, drives fail about once every 18 months as far as I can tell.

So, first things first. I've never lost a byte of data on the Drobo since I got it and I've had two drive failures. In this sense, it's delivered. I've expanded the capacity of the Drobo a couple of times and I ended up with more space.

Now, with the good part out of the way. The biggest problem with it has been that it's slow. Whats slow? It's like having a 27ms access time 14MB/sec external drive. I'm using the results from Toms Hardware, a respecting drive benchmarking web site. It's too slow to use as your main disk. Period. You won't be happy starting iMovie or iPhoto with this or watching HD movies in iTunes. It's really only fast enough as an archive drive, a time machine drive, a drive for backups or a drive with lots of capacity for keeping disk images and so on.

The software supplied with it is poor. The Dashboard (currently on 1.6.7) is buggy. It frequently doesn't detect my Drobo and a full iMac restart fixes the problem. I've attached the Drobo using USB and FW800 and didn't see much difference. The cable isn't the issue here, it's the controller in the unit. The dashboard doesn't provide a lot of information. It tells you the capacity of the drives, how much space there is left and if there is a recovery or relayout then it says how long is left. Recently, my WD Green 2TB drives were both failing and Drobo handled this without losing data. It spotted the bad areas and remapped them to good areas. This causes dynamic relayouts. Random warnings which trigger a relayout but it only lasts a few minutes instead of days. The issue is the Drobo doesnt say which drive triggered it. If a drive is failing then I want to know and I want to replace it before I lose the whole drive. I'd two drives both failing at different times which is super dangerous but the Drobo did not say to replace them.

You really need enterprise SATA drives also. I've had issues with desk top class drives from Seagate and WD. The issues seem to be around head load cycles and long error recovery times causing the Drobo to behave badly.

So, overall, I'm disappointed. Lack of diagnostics, software thats flaky and it's very slow. But, I never lost data. If I'd to do it again then I'd buy a QNAP 4 bay unit or something like that. The QNAP 459 is about the same price as a Drobo S and murders it as far as I can tell. I'm probably buying a QNAP in the next few months.

Swapping a dead WD Caviar Green 2TB drive out

Drobo support finally told me what I already knew from other sources, the drives in slot 3 and 4 were giving errors and causing the random dynamic rebuilds. Again, why can't they tell me a drive is about to fail with a flashing light on that bay? It's ridiculous that two drives were failing but the supplied firmware and software says nothing. They suggested replacing slot 3 first and then 4. Both drives are WD 20TB EADS drives.

I bought a WD Green 1.5Tb drive as the replacement and I just swapped it out now. Relayout looks to be around 24 hours as far as I can tell.

I'm now trying to get Western Digital to replace my failed drive as it has a 5 year warranty and the web site said it doesn't have enough information so call them. I'm on the phone now, waiting, listening to them telling me how important my call is despite the fact they can't be bothered to take it. Very annoying. Points of quality problems there if the RMA line is this busy.

Anyway, eventually, I hope to speak with a human and get a drive shipped to me and then I'll replace the drive in slot 4.

UPDATE: 22 minutes and someone picks up. Looks easy enough once they answer. I don't see why they couldn't do this on the web site. I used the advance RMA, they ship me a replacement, then I return the drive. 3-5 days for the drive to arrive. They took a credit card.

UPDATE: Relayout finished in about 18 hours which wasn't bad. One bad drive left which I'll replace when the WD RMA drive arrives this week.

WD 2Tb EADS Green drive LLC problems with RAID/Drobo

Looks like my WDCWD20EADS drives are aging prematurely because of the green technology. They spin down after 8 seconds apparently and in a Drobo, this means they keep spinning up and down and effectively wear out faster. There are a few posts on the forums about this on the web. So, the moral of the story may be to avoid WD green drives for Drobo or other RAID type applications.

WDCWD20EADS LCC problems

Looks like my EADS drives are aging prematurely because of the green technology. They spin down after 8 seconds apparently and in a Drobo, this means they keep spinning up and down and effectively wear out faster. There are a few posts on the forums about this on the web. So, the moral of the story may be to avoid WD green drives for Drobo or other RAID type applications.

Both my WD 2Tb WDCWD20EADS Green Drives are bad

So, it looks like my Drobo is acting up because both my 2TB WD green drives are giving errors or very slow to respond (20 secs). They are both WDCWD20EADS models. And of course, the new 2TB I bought today was the same model so awesome.

The moral of the story here seems to be don't buy your drives from the same manufacturer.

Fortunately, I just use my Drobo for backups now so if the drives double fail during the current relayout then it's not the end of the world. All my Data is on a normal USB external drive regardless. I've sent a note to WD to try to get the two drives RMAed, we'll see what happens.

The current relayout is likely to take days anyway. If the replacement drives arrive then it'll take 8 days to switch out the bad ones plus the current rebuild time anyway. It will definitely be faster to assume the data on the Drobo is lost and trash it. Put the new drives in and reformat and then copy the data back on to it.

The really annoying thing here is WHY doesn't the Drobo tell me what the hell is going on with the drives? How hard would it have been to tell me the bottom drive is giving trouble two months ago? The lack of diagnostic information in the product is just unacceptable.

Drobo still too hard to use, guessing whats wrong now...

UPDATE:

This post was too optimistic. The problem turned out to be bad WD 2Tb drives of the EADS model. The issue is the Drobo despite trying to handle the errors in no way indicates to the user what the problem is so they can replace the drives before catastrophe strikes.

Currently, My Drobo 2nd gen is acting flaky. Randomly, it says my data isn't protected and then the lights start flashing green/orange. After a period of time then it all goes back to green. During this period, my used and free capacity stays the same.

I think whats happening is one of the drives has a bad block(s) and Drobo is handling it BUT it's not telling me which drive is causing the issue. So, it keeps happening because I've no idea which drive is the problem so I can't swap the drive out. This is VERY annoying. The diagnostics file it generates is, of course, encrypted so I've no idea whats actually happening and despite sending them a diagnostics file, they haven't even looked at it in over a month. They closed my ticket as solved because I took longer than 2 days to respond to a question I could only answer when the flakyiness happened again and hey, it's flaky, it doesn't happen when they want it to.

Now, this morning, it went flaky again. But, it went green after the period. Then I rebooted the iMac so their dash board would detect the Drobo (looks like it's not just the drive thats flaky, their software is something else...). On rebooting, the Dashboard detected the Drobo but when the Drobo was starting, it marked drive 2 as BAD. 3 green lights but one red light on the second from the top drive which is the oldest drive in my array, a 750GB WD drive. So, I'm hoping that if I swap that drive then I'll be ok. Problem now is this is just a guess. I just bought another WD 2TB green drive ready to go in as soon as the array goes back to green.

UPDATE:

So, it finally went all green again so before anything else happened, I removed the 750Gb drive in slot 2 and put in a new 2Tb WD green drive. The relayout is happening now and this will take 2 or 3 days probably. Gotta love Drobo, not...

USB solves Drobo spurious bad drive errors

UPDATE:

This post was too optimistic. The problem turned out to be bad WD 2Tb drives of the EADS model. The issue is the Drobo despite trying to handle the errors in no way indicates to the user what the problem is so they can replace the drives before catastrophe strikes.

As reported before, my 2nd Gen Drobo was reporting data not protected critical alerts periodically for no apparent reason. I switched from FW800 to USB on a guess and since doing this, it isn't happening anymore. I did open a ticket with Drobo support but found the whole exercise very frustrating.

I attached a Drobo dash board diagnostics file on the original ticket and then Drobo answered asking for stuff like Drobo versions, volume types and names, capacity used and so on. Are they saying that their diagnostics file includes none of that information? Seriously? There was also a respond in two days or we'll close your ticket ultimatum and of course, my problem happens spuriously so answering specific questions on it is kind of hard when it's spurious.

Needless to say 4 days after opening the ticket, it happened again and I responded at that point. But, the response seems to be ignored now. No matter. Switching to USB helped but what was slow before is now even slower. It's the worlds most expensive consumer tape drive. Knowing what I know now, I'd never have bought the thing. I'd have been better off buying three external 2Tb drives. One for actual use for my data and the other two configured as a striped 4Tb drive for time machine and so on. Total cost would be 600 bucks instead of 1500 for my current setup and 2k for a Drobo S setup.

The FW800 cable just doesn't look very 'good'. I think it was randomly disconnecting or something but why this triggers a critical error on a Drobo is bizarre to me as I can't figure how the FW cable makes the Drobo unit think a drive has failed.

Would the Drobo be easier to live with/expand than my 3 x 2Tb USB solution above? No way. Expanding the Drobo is a week long affair. Pulling a drive and then inserting a larger drive means 4 days of downtime while it does the relayout and you can only upgrade one drive at a time. It's quicker to copy from the external USBs I mentioned above to new USBs than to do this and considerably less risky. Hindsight as usual is great. The USB setup seems 'better' to me in hindsight. The external USB drives simply blow the Drobo away performance wise so thats what I would have done and thats what I'm moving to over time right now.

Want to lose weight? There is an app for that. LiveStrong

I hit my life time high weight back in October 2009. 185lbs. I'm 5" 8. I had a belly and I wasn't happy about it. It was time to do something about it. Exercise is, of course, part of it but 30 minutes a day is about 300-400 calories. The faster way to lose weight is to simply eat less. Losing weight is just math. Calories in minus calories out. 3.5k cals is 1lb. Don't eat 7k cals a week and you lose two lbs a week which is about the most you should lose per week. Exercising to lose 7k a week is almost impossible until you're full time in the gym. It's easier to just drop my calorific intake from 2.6k cals a day to 1.6k. I got the livestrong application for my iPhone. This lets me enter my current weight and set a goal like 2lbs a week. I can then use it to record everything I eat/drink and it tracks the calories and how many I have left that day. It has the livestrong web site also with the daily plate where I can track my weight. If you exercise then you can add that in also. If you burn 500 cals then you eat 500 cals more. You just need to make sure you stay on target. Livestrong will adjust your daily calorie budget downwards as you lose weight. I started about 1650 cals a day, now I'm at 1510 or so.

This graph shows my weight loss since mid October 2009. I'm down nearly 20lbs and my goal is 155lbs. After a couple of months using livestrong I got in to a routine. I know my regular breakfast, lunch and dinners and can pretty much calculate calories in my head.

This does work. It's not a fad diet. Doctor Phil or Oprah won't be endorsing it because there is no money in it. EAT LESS and you lose weight. It's simple.