Update
Well bugger me, it would appear that Drobo is on the ball when it comes to support, I received the following message from them within 48 hours of posting this blog (I did not contact them):
“Hi Mark
Thank you for your feedback ( I happened to come across your blog). I have created a case for you for the purpose of forwarding your feedback to our product development team for review. No need to respond, just wanted to thank you and let you know what we were doing.
Kind Regards,
****
Drobo – Tier 3 Support Engineer”
10 out of 10 again Lads!
End Update
I had a strange Hiccup from one of my Drobo FS’s during the weekend, a brief ‘weerrr-clunk’ from one of the drives and connection was lost, after some unsuccessful attempts to reconnect a re-boot was performed after this I was treated to the happy message
Mount Failed – Internal Error
Lovely!!! thankfully Drobo have posted the solution on their Web Site
You have to press Ctrl – Shift – M then type in “Proceed”, it will then trundle off and run a full check disk and afterwards request a reboot, which worked perfectly, OK boys 10 of 10 for good functionality but -100 for UI, if this is the correct (and only) response to an ‘internal Error’ message, why is there not a bloody great big button marked “Don’t panic! run check disk now” under the error!!
Oh and while I’m at it, the new dash board is not a step forward!, its runs at half the speed, occupies twice the screen space (so big in fact it is unusable on a netbook) and as far as I can tell does not add any new functionality (if fact it takes it away as it does not show the space available pie charts in the task bar and does not support droboshares), so I will be sticking to the old one, so dear Drobo, you are nice an big and successful now, but your original engineers still knock the spots off the new ui people you have hired,
finally a bit of info, as a long time owner of Drobos (V1 Classic, V2 Classic, Drobo share, Drobo FS) I can confirm that they have got faster with each generation (as advertised), this seems to me to be keeping in line with growing drive sizes, so a near fully loaded* consumer/pro level Drobo will always take about 24 hours to get over an outage or drive change, patience people patience, it will get there (i have never lost any data off a Drobo)
- by fully loaded I mean all bays filled with the largest supported drives and about 80%-85% full.