Drobo 5N Eating WD Red Drives

[Andrew Ellis]

Hello,

I have had a Drobo 5N for roughly two years. In that time I have gone through 7, yes seven, Western Digital Red drives. Three of those drives failed after a power outage. I am hooked up to a surge protecter with a backup power supply in between the Drobo and Surge Protector.

My question is, are these Western Digital Red (1TB) drives to blame, or the Drobo? I've RMAed 4 of them, 3 were out of warranty. This process is kind of getting annoying having to do this every 4-6 months.

With my latest failure I managed to pull the drive and hooked it up to my Macbook Pro running Ubuntu in a VirtualBox VM. However, I was unable to run fsck on the drive, probably due to the fact the drive is still formatted to the proprietary Drobo file system (reporting as an Unknown FS in Ubuntu).

I'm running badblocks on it right now, but due to it being a 1TB drive it wont be done for roughly 13 hours.

Cheers,
Andrew

 

[SuperSoph_WD]

Hey there, @Andrew!

I'm so sorry to hear about your WD Red HDDs failures. However, I highly doubt that you are just that 'lucky' to get so many failures with the WD Reds. I'd recommend you check their performance in a desktop or a different NAS enclosure. The power surge could have damaged the network attached storage itself, which could be killing them, too. I'd strongly recommend you contact the NAS manufacturer's official customer support for assistance. In the mean time, let me know what the diagnostic tests on the WD Reds show. Always make sure you purchase drives that are within the warranty period and check them on our website, if needed. At least you will be able to RMA them.

Keep me posted.
SuperSoph_WD

 

[azaran]

It sounds like more of a Drobo issue than WD issue. To burn through that many drives and have it be a WD fault you'd have to have pissed off some tech god or another. I'm running a Drobo 5N with all WD red drives and I've never had an issue with either so I don't think there is any inherent problem with the combo of the two.

 

[Andrew Ellis]

Hey there, @Andrew!

I'm so sorry to hear about your WD Red HDDs failures. However, I highly doubt that you are just that 'lucky' to get so many failures with the WD Reds. I'd recommend you check their performance in a desktop or a different NAS enclosure. The power surge could have damaged the network attached storage itself, which could be killing them, too. I'd strongly recommend you contact the NAS manufacturer's official customer support for assistance. In the mean time, let me know what the diagnostic tests on the WD Reds show. Always make sure you purchase drives that are within the warranty period and check them on our website, if needed. At least you will be able to RMA them.

Keep me posted.
SuperSoph_WD

So far I'm at 79.54% after 9 hours. There are 0/0/0 errors reported from the badblocks command. Here is the output of the S.M.A.R.T. test as well: http://d.pr/i/11TRi

 

[Andrew Ellis]

It sounds like more of a Drobo issue than WD issue. To burn through that many drives and have it be a WD fault you'd have to have pissed off some tech god or another. I'm running a Drobo 5N with all WD red drives and I've never had an issue with either so I don't think there is any inherent problem with the combo of the two.

Are you using an SSD in the Accelerator Bay? I'm wondering if that has anything to do with my failure rate. What is weird though is it has always been a one drive failure. Never a multi drive failure.

 

[azaran]

It sounds like more of a Drobo issue than WD issue. To burn through that many drives and have it be a WD fault you'd have to have pissed off some tech god or another. I'm running a Drobo 5N with all WD red drives and I've never had an issue with either so I don't think there is any inherent problem with the combo of the two.

Are you using an SSD in the Accelerator Bay? I'm wondering if that has anything to do with my failure rate. What is weird though is it has always been a one drive failure. Never a multi drive failure.

Yep, have one in there.

 

[SuperSoph_WD]

What is weird though is it has always been a one drive failure. Never a multi drive failure.

Hello again, @Andrew!

You mentioned that it only happens with one drive at a time. Have you noticed which drive is it in the NAS HDD bays? If it's always the HDDs in those particular bays that fail, then the issue could be coming from the SATA connector inside the NAS.

SuperSoph_WD

 

[Andrew Ellis]

What is weird though is it has always been a one drive failure. Never a multi drive failure.

Hello again, @Andrew!

You mentioned that it only happens with one drive at a time. Have you noticed which drive is it in the NAS HDD bays? If it's always the HDDs in those particular bays that fail, then the issue could be coming from the SATA connector inside the NAS.

SuperSoph_WD

Sorry for such an extremely delayed response. I was able to resolve this issue by removing all of the hard drives and doing a pinhole reset on the Drobo 5N itself. After the reset, plugging in all of the drives and reinitializing them (via a full wipe of all drives), every drive is reporting as healthy to the Drobo.

So what I feel may have happened is the power surge may have trigger a false report on the individual drive in the firmware's lookup table.