Doh! My first hard drive failure in my Drobo!

It had to happen sooner or later. One of my hard drives in my Drobo failed yesterday.






As a rule, failures like these happen when there's a deadline looming. The deadline in this case is a talk my wife is giving tomorrow. Much of the imagery and data she needs are on the Drobo. The promise of the Drobo is that it should still be accessable even though a drive is out or during the rebuilding process. However, in this case, something about the rebuilding and the OS screwed up. Not only did the drobo become unavailable, the Finder on the OS locked up. As you can see from the screenshot above, the Drobo Dashboard is still working so I'm not messing with a reboot or anything until that completes. The OS itself seems quite functional under the Finder - it's just the Finder is locked up and cannot be forced quit. This is probably something related to how I set up my system rather than a failure of the Drobo or its software, but we'll see. Anyway, if there's anything else wrong with the rebuild, I'll post it here.

One thing I didn't see anywhere is how to figure out how the drive has failed. I need to look into this.

This all brings me back to the issue of adding drives in a cost-effective manner. Now that I have a dead drive, I have a choice to make. 1) Leave the bay empty, 2) Replace the drive with the smaller drive I removed earlier, or 3) buy a new drive.

Option 1 is a tolerable solution. Even with the loss of the drive, I would have a fully protected system with almost a half-terabyte free. The only issue is that there's not enough space for a rebuild should another drive fail; the data would be protected until such an event, but no rebuilding would be possible until a new drive is added.

Option 2 is tolerable as well. I can reinsert the 320 gig drive into the drobo and it would bump me back up to about 2 tb of useable space. However, at this point, the 320 might be better use as a backup drive that I store elsewhere. It's not large, but it would be good as a backup drive.

Option 3 is my preferred option, but will probably have to wait. At this point, if I'm going to add a new drive, I'd prefer the largest drive that I can afford, at least 1.5 TB. Although only 1 TB would be usable, rather than the full 1.5, it will allow some room to grow when the drobo fills up without having to buy at least 2 drives at a time. Maybe a WD green 1.5 TB drive....