Personal

Rethink using Drobo, maybe just dump it.

My Drobo was at 4TB used and reporting 80 hours to relayout the drive incorporating the new disk replacing the failed one. The only thing on my Drobo is backups. All my important data is on a 1TB USB drive.

So, I asked myself, why am I waiting? I can lose the backups. Then I'm thinking if everytime I lose a drive in my Drobo array, I end up reformatting the array and losing the data then why bother with a Drobo in the first place. What a waste of money! Given I can't use it as my main drive because it's too slow, it's only useful as a backup drive and when a drive fails on it, I have reformatted it ergo, why even bother...

I reformatted it then. Volume management on it is pretty poor. Basically you pick a maximum volume size and if that is < the available space then you can make multiple volumes that size. In my case, I have about 5TB usable space. If I make a volume 4TB volume then it lets me make two 4TB volumes. If I say 2TB then it lets me make 4 2TB volumes. What I can't do is what I want to do...

I want to make a 3TB volume for backups and a 13TB volume for slow raided data. You can't do it. This way if time machine goes crazy again, I can just reformat the 3TB volume and not lose the other data. But, this is impossible with Drobo.

So, I'm stuck with making two 4TB volumes, one for time machine and the other for 'slowdata'. I don't want to have a 4TB time machine volume but there are no other options besides a bunch of 2TB volumes.

I'm currently using superduper to make a smart image of my 1TB drive in the Drobo 4TB 'slowdata' volume. Once thats done, then I'll start time machine again using the Drobo 4TB 'TM' volume.

This is why you look forward to getting home from a road trip and enjoying your weekend, not...

Storage management is the biggest IT issue at home and Drobo is right in the center!

So,

Recently, a drive failed in my Drobo and time machine went crazy again filling it by making complete backups continually rather than incremental backups.

I organize my home system like this. The iMac with a 320GB drive is the main desktop. I have a 1TB USB attached drive. I keep iPhoto/iTunes/iMovie on this external drive. I have a Drobo 2nd gen with 5TB available attached to the iMac using FW800. Due to performance issues, the Drobo is only good for backups.

Deleting the 'corrupt' Time machine backup directory on the Drobo is almost impossible. 2 million files, 4TB of data and MacOs says root doesn't have permission to do it regardless. The only way out here is to wipe the drive (reformat) hence, don't keep files on the drive where you point time machine at, it only ends in tears.

My 1TB 'data' drive is 850GB now. It's time to upgrade it to a larger drive. I could buy a 2TB drive and then a 2 bay USB enclosure to copy the data to the new one. That will cost between 200 and 250 depending on the drive type.

My biggest issue I think is the Drobo is too slow to be useful as a main drive. I might be better off just biting the bullet and dumping it. Buy a QNAP TS45x (800 bucks) and just put my existing drives inside it. Now, I have a 'fast' external RAID drive with lots of capacity to use as my data drive and I can make a smaller volume for time machine.

I think Drobo's lack of usefulness as anything other than a backup drive is the center of the issues at home right now.

Replaced drive on Drobo and time machine gone crazy again

One of my 1TB WD Green drives failed earlier in the week while I was away. The Drobo emailed me indicated the fault and that it was low on disk space. I got home today and bought a black WD 2TB drive this time for 204USD plus tax. I pulled out the 'failed' WD 1TB drive and popped in the new one. The drive was hard to pull out. I ended up using a metal pin under the drive to get it to come out, the springs in the Drobo don't work anymore for that tray.

So, that solves the immediate problem of getting the Drobo working again. It'll take probably 2 or 3 days now to relayout the data using the new drive. It's currently got 3 x 2TB drives and a 1.5TB drive giving 5TB of usable space.

The next problem is why is the Drobo full? It looks like my time machine is gone crazy again and is continually backing up the whole drive again. Last time, this was the spotlight metadata so I'll try that again but maybe thats a symptom of my USB drive failing also. I think I'll check the smart status of my 1TB USB drive and the failed drive this evening. This is a problem with USB drives or the Drobo, you cant easily see the SMART status. I put the drives in a PC desktop that I have for games to see them.

Time machine doesn't seem to deal well with backing up external drives

My home iMac has an external 1TB USB drive where I keep all my iPhoto, iTunes and iMovie stuff. I use timemachine to backup both my main HD and that drive to my Drobo. But, recently, it's going a little crazy. MY machine goes to sleep every night and wakes up every morning. Sometimes, the 1TB drive doesn't reappear on my desktop and I need to unplug/pluug it back in to get the drive to appear. This looks like a MacOs bug but what ever, this is what happens.

Lately, timemachine is making crazy sized backups. I just watched it do a 700GB one and as I type, it's doing another 900GB one. The only drive getting any traffic right now is the 1TB one so I'm assuming timemachine is doing a full backup of everything on that drive which is crazy as 99% of it hasn't changed since yesterday.

So, the question is, if a drive that is backed up by time machine isn't available when a backup is scheduled, does timemachine then think it's gone? And then later when you reattach, does time machine then decide to back the whole thing up again? For me, this is a rhetorical question as that seems to explain whats going on at least here. I'm on MacOs 10.6.4. Any one any ideas?

For now, I turned off the scheduled sleep/wakeup stuff thinking maybe thats when the 1TB drive gets 'lost'. But, thats tomorrow, today, it's backing up over 800GB as I watch it...

SuperDuper my disk to Drobo 12 hours for 21Gb #fail

I hooked up my 2nd gen Drobo to my MacBook Pro using USB to super duper my internal 500Gb drive to it. After 12 hours, it has backed up about 21Gb. Seriously, I actually think there are tapes inside the Drobo, it's not a random access device at all... Giving up.

Drobo with reset WD Green drives looks stable

I had a lot of trouble with my 2nd gen Drobo and WD Green drives. I had two drives fail pretty much at the same time and Drobo had spotted drive problems that were recoverable but never hinted at it. Much as I'd love to throw out this Drobo, it's serving it's purpose as the worlds most expensive backup drive right now pretty well.

Since I reset the WD LCC using a PC, it's been working happily without any issues. It's still slow as molasses but in it's role as a backup drive, it's works well.

Once again, if I were to do this again, a simple 2 drive USB enclosure with mirroring and 2 x 2TB drives is a better buy. If you want a RAID type external as a main drive then buy something else. The Drobo S doesn't look much better BTW.

Reset WD Caviar IDLE3 timers to stop premature death

I've had two WD 2TB Caviar green drives fail in my Drobo. This happened on pretty new drives after only a couple of months usage. Googling the internet shows I'm not alone and the culprit seems to be the power saving features on the drive. The idle3 timer causes the drive to park the head after 8 seconds of idle time. On a RAID setup, it seems that this causes the drive to do this many times per day and as a result, they seem to fail because they park much too often and the drive dies prematurely as a result.

I downloaded a WD utility called WDIDLE3 which when you boot from DOS, allows you to see what the current IDLE3 setting is as well as change or disable it. All my WD Caviar green drives (I've looked at 6 tonight) were set to 8 seconds. I could disable the timer on my two 1TB drives. The 2TB and 1.5TB drives I could only set the timer to 62 minutes. The "WDIDLE3 /D" command does this.

Whether this really makes a difference to the drives reliability time will tell but this is the conventional wisdom right now.

Adding a drive to Drobo required reboot

This was strange. WD shipped me two new WD 2TB green drives to replace the two that failed. The drives worked fine and I could use them with my ThermalTake Blacx external USB drive. But, the Drobo didn't notice them when I inserted them in my spare Drobo slot, #4. I asked on the DroboSpace forums and they suggested rebooting the Drobo. After a reboot, the Drobo detects the drive and adds it in to the array. Very strange. Clearly, there must be another firmware revision coming along because it should detect the drive immediately. I'm currently on the latest and greatest. Firmware 1.3.6 and 1.3.8 dashboard.

I'm using the Drobo now as a pure timemachine drive only, it's too slow for any thing else. I was using a sparse bundle to hold my time machine backups on it but then the timemachine GUI doesn't show any history despite all the files being there. I just used the whole drive as the backup now and this avoids the history issue but the time machine volume will grow without bounds now.

Recovering from Drobo failure

So,

Bottom line is I lost the data on the Drobo. I pulled the bay 4 drive (WD 2TB caviar green) and RMAed it. I RESET the Drobo which puts it back to factory default state with 3 drives in it, 1TB, 1.5TB and a 2TB, all WD caviar green. I created a 16TB single volume and I'm using it for time machine only.

I made extra copies of my digital media regardless so thats all covered. I'm looking around now for a QNAP 419 or 459. Enough.

Advance RMA for second 2TB WD Caviar Green drive

I just did the advance RMA for my other failing WD drive just now. 5 minute wait and no hassles on the phone so pretty easy. The charge they hold on your credit card is pretty stiff though 297US so make sure you send back the broken drive :)