tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-13564835.post5751570349335419825..comments2011-05-27T09:27:56.114-05:00BillReadhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08441632361862169062noreply@blogger.comBlogger1125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-13564835.post-13354416281670691732011-05-26T15:43:31.208-05:002011-05-26T15:43:31.208-05:00Hi Bill,<br /><br />I&#39;m a Mac consultant to various businesses, and not an employee of Data Robotics.<br /><br />While it&#39;s definitely a bad idea to eject drives from a Drobo while it is running, I don&#39;t think ejecting four drives from a Drobo is the same as four drives failing simultaneously.<br /><br />As long as the same drive pack is put back into the Drobo, I would expect it to rebuild most of the time, just as your client&#39;s did.<br /><br />The big problem I have with the Drobo products is the drive latch. We have had numerous incidents (four in a row, in fact) where a smaller drive was ejected and a new drive inserted, only to have the Drobo do crazy things: report OTHER drives as failed, or go into a reboot loop, or fail to recognize a drive that had been in the unit only thirty seconds prior, with no additional drives added.<br /><br />In short, it appears that the drive latch can cause the drive to become unseated during operation, and it appears to us that this happens most frequently during drive replacement. We can&#39;t even nail it down to adjacent drives; sometimes replacing a drive in bay 2 will cause bay 4, or bay 5, to fail.<br /><br />Our largest concern with the Drobo is the seemingly random errors we get. For example, upon replacing a smaller drive with a larger one, the Drobo immediately reported too many drives removed, but even when we reseated each of the drives, the Drobo would randomly report different drives as failed or missing. This has happened with different Drobos, and different drives.<br /><br />If the Drobo had a locking latch mechanism, like so many other RAID products do, we think this problem could be avoided. For now, we aren&#39;t recommending our clients use Drobos because they are just too unreliable.macsimconhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11133488488152321746noreply@blogger.com