Critical Drobo Alert

[Thorin]

Critical Drobo Alert

Your Drobo: "Drobo1" has reported the following critical alert.

Red Alert. Drobo detected a hard drive failure. Replace the hard drive indicated by the blinking red light.

-----

That's the email I received today.  Turns out one of the drives I bought eight days ago has already bitten the bullet.  I wonder what MemEx's return policy is?  If it's 7 days like BCOM used to be, then I better start me an RMA process.

<sigh>  technology

[Tom]

I believe its 14 days. If you bought the insta RMA thing for $7-10 (I always do when I Get from memex) you get a new drive right away and they take care of the rest. Otherwise they will take your drive and tell you to come back to pick up a new drive after they've tested the one you gave them. Either way though its a max of a couple/few days without a drive.

Memex has been quite good to me, I expect they are still quite good about DOA hard drives.

I once had to RMA a hard drive /almost/ a couple weeks after I got it, and then RMA its replacement /almost/ a couple weeks later. The replacement's replacement is doing fine

[Thorin]

7 days for returns.
30 days for replacements.
1 year for in-store warranty (where they'll RMA / advance-RMA for you).

I brought it in and said my Drobo says it's dead.  They hooked it up to their test rig and it failed SeaTools in about a minute and a half.  So I got a new drive on the spot.

So much easier than anything I've had to return to Future Shop and BCOM (god, remember the lack of customer service at that place?).

Drobo's happy again, busy adding data to the new drive.

[Tom]

7 days for returns.
30 days for replacements.
1 year for in-store warranty (where they'll RMA / advance-RMA for you).

I brought it in and said my Drobo says it's dead.  They hooked it up to their test rig and it failed SeaTools in about a minute and a half.  So I got a new drive on the spot.

So much easier than anything I've had to return to Future Shop and BCOM (god, remember the lack of customer service at that place?).

Drobo's happy again, busy adding data to the new drive.

Yeah, MemEx is quite good about RMA. I think the reason they didn't want to do my second replacement right away is cause it seemed a bit suspicious. And I agree with that. Don't have much problem with them taking the extra step of testing it fully before giving me a /third/ drive.

I think maybe its their "advanced replacement" service that is 14 days. That warantee they like to push on you normally without it, they won't just give you a new drive on the spot. Maybe they will if the tech team in back isn't busy. I dunno.

[Thorin]

Actually, their IPR plan has a _lot_ of advantages if you have problems, such as replacement with new (instead of refurbished), new matching parts if needed (new mobo doesn't support old CPU?  Here's a new CPU too), much shorter turnaround time, and stuff like that.

I don't mind doing RMAs for drives when needed, so I don't pay the extra "lazy tax".  But the extra support _almost_ makes me pay for it (but then, I remember I'm Dutch and don't spend money freely).

[Tom]

Actually, their IPR plan has a _lot_ of advantages if you have problems, such as replacement with new (instead of refurbished), new matching parts if needed (new mobo doesn't support old CPU?  Here's a new CPU too), much shorter turnaround time, and stuff like that.

I don't mind doing RMAs for drives when needed, so I don't pay the extra "lazy tax".  But the extra support _almost_ makes me pay for it (but then, I remember I'm Dutch and don't spend money freely).

Heh. Even when I was dead broke I paid for even NCIX's version of the IPR. It wasn't worth the extra hassle later on. Also ncix pays for return shipping on RMAs with their thing, so that helps.

[Mr. Analog]

Awesome! I'm glad everything worked out for you.

Oddly enough I have to to replace a drive on my Drobo, somehow filled up 2 TB already...

[Tom]

Awesome! I'm glad everything worked out for you.

Oddly enough I have to to replace a drive on my Drobo, somehow filled up 2 TB already...

That's nothin.

Code Select Expand


Filesystem              Size  Used Avail Use% Mounted on
/dev/md2                5.5T  4.9T  647G  89% /mnt/boris/data


Anime:

Code Select Expand

2.3T    video/Anime/
254G    BitTorrent/00 Anime/
196G    BitTorrent/
2.8T    total


Bahaha.

[Thorin]

Nice, Tom.  Now, have you seen it and memorized it all?

Yeah, Mr. A, I'm over a gig now myself.  I've 4x1GB Western Digital Caviar Blacks (5 year warranty instead of the more common 3 year, that's why) in there, plus I turned on dual disk redundancy, so my 4TB turns into 2TB.  I expect it to fill up in another two years, at which time I don't know what I'll do - switch out two of the drives to 2TB drives, or find another file storage solution, or <gasp!> delete something.

[Mr. Analog]

Delete! what a horrible word lol

[Tom]

Nice, Tom.  Now, have you seen it and memorized it all?

Seen 90%+ of it. Probably closer to 99%.

Yeah, Mr. A, I'm over a gig now myself.  I've 4x1GB Western Digital Caviar Blacks (5 year warranty instead of the more common 3 year, that's why) in there, plus I turned on dual disk redundancy, so my 4TB turns into 2TB.  I expect it to fill up in another two years, at which time I don't know what I'll do - switch out two of the drives to 2TB drives, or find another file storage solution, or <gasp!> delete something.

I delete regular tv shows. But since I haven't watched most of this seasons shows yet, I haven't deleted them yet :-x I'll eventually get around to it. With the tv stuff deleted I sit at around 1TB free.

I also have 220G of music

[Thorin]

I dare you to put that on shuffle for an entire month...

[Tom]

I dare you to put that on shuffle for an entire month...

Heh. There's a lot of it that I got from big collections, or other people. I still have yet to go through it all and delete the @%&# I really don't like. There is some there.

Also there's a fair amount of FLAC, and 320kbps+ files.

[Melbosa]

I wish my Drobo only had a dead drive... turns out mine has a corrupt partition structure.  I have to run FSCK against it after I buy 5x2TB drives and clone them first.  I haven't been able to get at my 5.5TB of data now since last week when I rebuilt my backup and then my Drobo (primary source) died right after I formatted my backup drives.  GREAT TIMING!

I really am only scared at loosing my 300GB of Documents, and 2TBs of Photos/Home Videos.  I have no stateful backup of them since I reorged it all about 2 weeks ago.

[Tom]

Hm, if it were a normal NAS device I'd suggest gparted to attempt to repair the partition structure (it has a repair option, of course you still want to make a backup/clone before trying it). But afaik the drobo uses its own Logical Volume Management, soft RAID, and filesystem. so parted is unlikely to be able to find filesystems to mark as potential partitions.

Similar issues make me avoid hardware raid cards.