It was bound to happen eventually. My first ever(!!) *home* HD failure and I have been using HDs for 20+ years (when did the first HD based Mac appear -- 1986?)

One of the 1TB Seagate Barracuda 7200.11 drives in my Drobo red-lit this morning. I guess I am about to find out a number things: If the Drobo works as advertised and what it is like to get warranty service from a company not named Apple or Elgato. On the latter point, I am imagining it won't be overnight, so rather than take any chances, I'll pick up a replacement drive today thinking of a 1TB Western Digital -- any reason not to? (http://www.jr.com/western-digital/pe/WD_WD10000CSRTL/) since lately Seagate has not had a good rep (their 1.5TB HDs have been much maligned). And unfortunately the 2TB Western Digital drives are not yet Drobo certified, not to mention come with a 50% price premium.

When I get my replacement drive, I'll have a spare on site for future failures.

Suppose 1TB drives are $105. Six 1TB drives are $630. Three nice dual Firewire 800 enclosures from OWC are $360 and can bet set up to mirror. So 3TB of mirrored storage is $990. The Drobo is $1000 for 2.7TB of drobo protected storage.

Which is safest solution? Clearly the Drobo is a more attractive package with a smaller footprint. It will be one HPFS volume to the Mac instead of three for the mirrors. (Until ZFS) It could be less noisy; I don't know. It has four drive mechanisms to fail instead of six. Do we trust what goes on inside the Drobo? Mirror expansion is $330/TB, Drobo is more complicated. Drobo only has one power plug.

Has your head exploded yet?

Has your head exploded yet?
I follow you completely -- however space limitations + WAF == Drobo. No choice.

I lost two 750GB drives in separate enclosures at the same time during a power failure. They were on good quality surge protectors. Are any of these solutions worth the money without a UPS?

So far, not very reassuring. I swapped the drive, and it stayed red, as expected -- the Drobo has to redistribute the data, and considering I had 4 x 1TB drives in there, and the Drobo was ~450GB away from hitting its 2.7GB capacity, I understand the operation will take hours.

However in the meantime the Drobo was supposed to be usable -- no such luck -- it is seen as as mounted by the Finder, but it can't see any files, and the Drobo Utility says "Ready for Connection". I'll leave it alone overnight, if it hasn't returned to normal by tomorrow morning I'll try rebooting the Mini.

Rebooted the Mini twice this morning, it does not see the Drobo. I was about to pull the plug on the Drobo, but I felt its drives spinning up, I'm afraid of killing it right in the middle of its recovery process. It still showing green lights on three dives and a red light where the new drive went in.

A massive FAIL so far. Maybe I should disconnect it from the Firewire chain and hook a USB cable? Unfortunately I have to head in to the office, but I am about to find out the quality of Data Robotics support tonight/tomorrow.

That completely sucks. I hope things turn out. I've always considered a drobo but it doesn't turn out to be as good as advertised I'll continue with my franken'linux setup.

Good news, pulling the Drobo (power) plug and reconnecting it via USB did the trick. All my data is visible, and It is recovering right now. Bad news it will take 51 hours before it is back "in drives are allowed to fail mode".

Spoke to Drobo tech support, they answered immediately and were very professional -- said it should be first not last in the firewire chain, so that along with the drive failure may have caused the issue. Said "don't use Seagate drives, use Western Digital" -- I did get a WD as my replacement -- unfortunately I have 3 more Seagate drives waiting to fail -- hopefully not in the next 51 hours...

This story just keeps getting worse: 18 hours away from the end of the recovery process the Drobo hung again and subsequent attempts to reboot it led to the Drobo hanging again almost immediately.

Drobo customer support are telling me that a couple of my Seagate 7200.11 drives have bad firmware. Is there a way to update the firmware without nuking the data on the drives?

Meanwhile they are sending me a new Drobo in case that is the problem. I hope it is because it did work flawlessly for over half a year before everything went south this week -- multiple simultaneous drive failures would truly suck.

They also mentioned something about a jumper change being necessary for the Seagates to use their mac throughput -- does anyone know anything about that? seagate.com is not very user friendly, to put it mildly.

well, it worked flawlessly until you actually had to rely on the main reason you bought it--so I'd think the least they could do is send you a new unit just for your piece of mind going forward. I'd wonder how many other Drobo users have had the same thing happen to them and have been given the same spiel about firmware and jumper changes? I have to admit, I haven't paid too close attention to them once they shut down their discussion forum from public view, so I'm not in a position to help you. The largest Seagate SATA drives I have are 500GB and are unaffected.

There's a lot of info on the 7200.11 Seagates at Macintouch:

http://www.macintouch.com/readerreports/harddrives/topic3441.html#d16jan2009

Thanks, Chef -- of course the Macintouch stuff is depressing reading, maybe I should just read about the stock market instead.

OK, this seems to be a link to the firmware (http://seagate.custkb.com/seagate/crm/selfservice/search.jsp?DocId=207951&Hilite=7200.11)
apparently it involves booting in something called Open DOS and then fixing the firmware. The trouble is of course that this would only help if you had a MacPro with a SATA slot to put the thing in. I wonder if this will help:
Voyager Q (http://eshop.macsales.com/item/Newer%20Technology/FWU2ES2HDK/)

well, wait a minute, isn't one of the recommended Drobo troubleshooting steps to pull your drives and pop them into that new Drobo? Or are you past the ability to do that already?

well, wait a minute, isn't one of the recommended Drobo troubleshooting steps to pull your drives and pop them into that new Drobo? Or are you past the ability to do that already?
Clearly popping the drives in a new Drobo is step 1.

But if that doesn't work (or even if it succeeds) the Seagate firmware issue doesn't go away. There is clearly no way to upgrade the Seagate firmware of a drive in the Drobo (something that Data Robotics might want to consider for the future).

The replacement Drobo arrived and it was of no help whatsoever. After I moved over the disks it lasted in recovery mode (showing 32 hours remaining) for about five minutes then rebooted itself, 10 more minutes then hung.

Before I go trying to update the firmware on the Seagates, I'm hoping that there is some way to put the Drobo in "read only, don't try to recover mode" and copy the data to another disk. Doubt it though. I'm very, very depressed.

At this point I'd say my plans for getting the new Mini are gone -- I am much more inclined to get the bottom end MacPro, where I can have 8TB of internal disk space, with no wife angering external wires/enclosures (but 4 FW800 ports, just in case). I can do my own backups of any data worth backing up, and never again be so stupid as to depend on a proprietary RAID.

Well don't be too quick to blame RAID. It isn't a backup system, it's an availability/speed system. RAID can bite you in the arse weather it is "proprietary" or not.

If you run the drobo without the replacement drive won't it allow you to access the data? Isn't it only dying if you are trying to rebuild the set?

Upgrading the firmware shouldn't destroy the contents on the drive. That would be strange.

Well don't be too quick to blame RAID. It isn't a backup system, it's an availability/speed system. RAID can bite you in the arse weather it is "proprietary" or not.

If you run the drobo without the replacement drive won't it allow you to access the data? Isn't it only dying if you are trying to rebuild the set?

Upgrading the firmware shouldn't destroy the contents on the drive. That would be strange.
That's a superb suggestion, thank you!!! -- should have thought to do that myself.

As far as the firmware upgrade, sure, in theory, it shouldn't. But after spending time reading the Seagate 7200.11 horror stories on Macintouch, I'm not counting on anything.

And "availability/speed" of RAIDs? Let's see -- I've been living without my iTunes Library and video collection for a week and a half now -- FAIL on availability. And the Drobo is considerably slower than an OWC Mercury Elites I was using before so speed doesn't count either. Honestly, the ONLY attraction to the Drobo was "no backups needed". Take that away, and "fewer cables" becomes the only rationale, except that we the backup drives, that pretty much goes away too.

I am much more inclined to get the bottom end MacPro, where I can have 8TB of internal disk space, with no wife angering external wires/enclosures (but 4 FW800 ports, just in case). I can do my own backups of any data worth backing up, and never again be so stupid as to depend on a proprietary RAID.

For a true backup strategy, you must have offsite storage (perhaps at a friend's or relative's house). Otherwise, a fire (or more likely a thief) can liberate your computer and its backups.

For easy offsite backups you need an external enclosure, or you need to pop internal drives in and out (not sure how many insertion/removal cycles the Mac Pro internal drive connectors are good for).

BTW you don't necessarily need to have 8 TB of data offsite. Perhaps a 1 TB drive will be sufficient. You can always count on recovery via bit-torrent for all your media files. :-)

Unfortunately I don't practice what I preach. I use external drives for backup, but none are offsite.

I shouldn't say anything lest I jinx it, but mym6's plan is working -- removing the new WD drive seems to have stabilized the Drobo and I am copying stuff to a 2TB MyBook. It is royally slow, even with straight FW800 (I plugged them in to my MBP for extra speed and reliability). I just wish I hadn't wasted another couple of days for advice from Drobo support who assured me that pulling the drive out wouldn't help.

Anyway, if I manage to rescue 100% of my data, I'll chalk it up to a lesson learned and leave it at that. And as for you dear reader, you can draw your own conclusions on what you should or shouldn't buy.

Phantom Gremlin: I do actually have an off site backup of my iTunes Library -- the problem is that it is woefully out of date. If you have say 4TB worth of data, keeping *fresh* off site backups is an expensive and time consuming proposition.

Once you have your data copied off, (I imagine you do by now) then maybe you can update the firmware on the drives and do some testing. It could really be as simple as the firmware being bad.

Get the data off, then update the firmware, make sure the data is all still there then try to rebuild the setup with the new drive inserted.

Once you have your data copied off, (I imagine you do by now) then maybe you can update the firmware on the drives and do some testing. It could really be as simple as the firmware being bad.

Get the data off, then update the firmware, make sure the data is all still there then try to rebuild the setup with the new drive inserted.
Not, yet -- it is excruciatingly slow. By tonight I'll have about 1TB copied with another 1TB to go. (I have a total of 2.3TB on there but at least 300G is sacrificeable.)

I've decided to get a MacPro, so once that arrives I'll be in a position to upgrade the firmware on the Seagates, but I'll be ordering it in the beginning of April, so it will be at least a couple of weeks before I have a chance to do it. In any event, I have a hard time imagining that I'll use the Drobo to store anything important again

Thanks again so much for your great advice!

The backup is done -- I copied off 2TB worth of data including all my EyeTV music clips and other saved recordings, movies and my iTunes Library, everything else I can live without. The next update will be after I get a MacPro with which I'll attempt to fix the Seagate firmware. I'm relieved, but this whole experience has been a major pain.

I'm not too sure what the moral is, but there is one piece of advice I can offer -- if you are using Seagate 7200.11 Barracudas of any capacity, do yourself a favor and make sure your data is backed up on something that is not a Seagate. And don't read Macintouch or the Drobo forums -- it will keep you up at night, better to watch a nice calming horror film instead.

I have a Drobo too but mostly populated with WD TB green drives. It isn't Drobo's fault about the state of Seagate's firmware of recent and there isn't a way you could really upgrade the firmware inside a Drobo, even under Windows. AFAIK you can only upgrade the firmware using their bootable tool disk on a SATA bus. I did this for one of my 1.5TB drives and it was pretty simple and easy. They recommended to remove all other drives in the machine as a precaution which might be a bit overkill but prudent as rewriting the firmware on the wrong drive could make a nice paperweight. You don't need to even have a Bootcamp install to boot into windows - you just make a bootable CD which any intel based machine should be capable of running.

One thing I think Data Robotics should allow for is more information about the drives populating the Drobo to be available to the end user. I realize they are all about the autonomous robot angle on the product but I would like to be able to check what the firmware of the drives are when issues arise or I read something that might affect my unit in the future. Their support information output file the Dashboard software can generate is generally unusable but I bet it contains this information, or at least it should if they aren't idiots over at Data Robotics. I know at some point they un-certified the use of the 1.5TB drives in the Drobo because they would have a nasty tendency to stall and drop out of raids because the controller took this stall as a failure. Since they upgraded the firmware of the 1.5ers they appear to be pretty good and have been re-certified for use in the Drobo. I have 2 and haven't had issue with either. Hopefully Seagate puts this dark firmware chapter behind them.

I too want one of the new MP's but my old quad 3.0 Xeon still feels so darn nice, maybe if I find it a good home ;)

It isn't Drobo's fault about the state of Seagate's firmware of recent and there isn't a way you could really upgrade the firmware inside a Drobo, even under Windows...

One thing I think Data Robotics should allow for is more information about the drives populating the Drobo to be available to the end user. I realize they are all about the autonomous robot angle on the product but I would like to be able to check what the firmware of the drives are when issues arise or I read something that might affect my unit in the future. Their support information output file the Dashboard software can generate is generally unusable but I bet it contains this information, or at least it should if they aren't idiots over at Data Robotics. I know at some point they un-certified the use of the 1.5TB drives in the Drobo because they would have a nasty tendency to stall and drop out of raids because the controller took this stall as a failure. Since they upgraded the firmware of the 1.5ers they appear to be pretty good and have been re-certified for use in the Drobo. I have 2 and haven't had issue with either. Hopefully Seagate puts this dark firmware chapter behind them.

I too want one of the new MP's but my old quad 3.0 Xeon still feels so darn nice, maybe if I find it a good home ;)
The thing is this, Data Robotics only warned about the 1.5TB Barracuda's not any other kind (mine are all 1TB). And in even the 1.5 TB warning was buried deep inside their website. And since the 1TBs are on present evidence capable of rendering their device inoperable, they darn well should be warning about all of them, and in way more prominent place.

Absolutely agree D.R. should give you a way to check the firmware, all the more because they have one -- namely their diagnostic dump, which however is in no way user readable. And DR needs to take more responsibility for the firmware mess beyond "call Seagate" unless they are going to put on the main page of drobo.com a big red rotating, flashing neon sign saying "DON"T USE SEAGATE DRIVES". At this point, they have been made aware that bad Seagate drives can render a Drobo inoperable or lead to data loss. DR has three choices:

1) Warn users not to use Seagates.
2) Provide a way to update their firmware though the Drobo itself for their multitude of Mac customers who don't happen to have access to a MacPro or other SATA equipped Intel machine.
3) Make the Drobo firmware robust enough to be able to rebuild their disk array even while some of the old drives are firmware challenged Seagates -- in other words make it possible for you to get rid of your Seagates without losing your data.

Finally Data Robotics needs to step up and and improve their customer support. It is pathetic that I got better advice from a someone on AVS who doesn't even own a Drobo than from DR's customer support. It would behoove them to open up their forums to the public as well.

I don't disagree with anything you wrote except providing a way to upgrade the firmware of the drive in the Drobo. While it would be nice and convenient I don't think it's possible and that would have to be Seagate's doing. Most of the time you can read the firmware on the label but I hate popping drives out of my Drobo just to look at them and it doesn't help if you upgraded the firmware previously and some new unknown issue pops up and you want to see what you have and can't remember what you upgraded to. The 2TB WD drives have been tested as OK by DR but I would try to avoid Seagates in a Drobo, or any RAID device for that matter, in the near future.

One thing that irks me about DR is their closed forum. Only having people who own the device with a SN be allowed into your forums is not something that inspires confidence.

Edit- They did prominently drop the 1.5 from their Drobolator configuration page for a long time but you are right about them not really making the greater 7200.11 issue more prominent. The thing that baffles me a little is that is isn't THEIR product that is the real culprit, they very easily could have blamed 90% of it on Seagate and helped their customers at the same time making them aware that Seagates weren't the way to go in the Drobo at this time.