This afternoon I had decided to purchase not just one Drobo, but two. Yes two of the latest and greatest.

One as a direct attached FW800 connected device, the other was the Networked Attached Storage (NAS) device running over my gigabit ethernet network. That was the easy part. Parting with my cold hard earned cash was easy compared to what was install for me later on.

Drobo, for me, to date, was a fairly easy device to get running. The old trusty device which included a share was working fine. But the biggest complaint was the speed. And it was terrible. So slow in fact that some applications that I was using even timed out and through up errors. Terrible experience. This time around I was looking for speed to backup across my network.

Following the instructions was straight forward. Pop some disks into the slots and you are off and running. Well so I thought. That where it went all pear shaped. Once the disks were in, and given I had already had a version of the Drobo Dashboard installed, I thought it would just find it. Not so!

Could this be a firmware issue? Maybe. Scratching my head I thought that the CD, that I actually had placed in the bin, might have some answers. I inserted the CD into my iMac and what would you know, there was a newer version of the Drobo Dashboard. The version that I had running on my machine was 1.6.8. The CD version was 1.7.0. Sounds great now. I thought that was all sorted.

I booted up the Drobo with no disks installed, and the Dashboard found it. I then forced the Dashbard to check for updates and there was a newer version again. That’s ok. So I installed that. Now it shows version 1.7.1. All this time I had looked on the Drobo website and it showed the latest was 1.6.8. What the hell is that about. No wonder this was confusing the crap out of me and possible others. I popped the disks back in. Nothing! Now I was getting annoyed. Time to check the Drobo Help online. The Knowledge Base articles had nothing  about how to troubleshoot the failure of the Dashboard to find the Drobo nor the all RED lights issue. Bloody pathetic!!

The Drobo disk error message that I received from the Drobo FS

All the disks were showing RED. Very bad in the Drobo world. I thought this couldn’t be true. These were working just fine a few minutes ago in my old Drobo. Could this be because they were from the ‘old’ Drobo and the data on them was confusing the newer Drobo. Ok, this is getting weird. Lucky enough I had an old drive caddy and so I proceeded to reformat the disks, one by one with Mac OS X disk utility. After dong the re-formatting it was probably not needed. Come to think of it, a bit of a waste of time really. Still getting the same error message, Unknown Disk Set Version.

Firmware again I hear you ask? So I forced Drobo Dashboard to check for firmware updates. There was one for the Drobo FS itself.  This installed fine and I restarted the Drobo. Booted fine. 1 green light, 2 green lights and so on. Looking good now.

So overall the experience wasn’t all that great from the start to about now. It was a good 3 or 4 hours of my time reading and reviewing the issues surrounding the things I have mentioned.  If only the Drobo website had this sort of information. Maybe one day they will. No point hiding it or not telling people.

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