Drobo freezes 10.7 Lion Server

Richard, since you have the ATTO installed already, can you please check the following:

1. Check your system logs for kernel messages indicating "I/O errors" on your Drobo disks.
2. Check the performance when transferring data FROM the Drobo (not to).

Reason I am asking: I also have the ATTO installed already, but I am seeing a lot of I/O errors when copying stuff from the Drobo volumes. Which is causing the performance to drop considerably (1-2 mbit/sec.).

Thanks,

Sascha

I bought the ATTO initiator yesterday. Had a I known Drobo had licensed it and was going to include it in a new release I wouldn't have done so. There goes $200.Hey Drobo, how about a $200 credit towards a new device?

I'm also having problems with a direct FireWire connection w/10.7.1.

Andrew

@cryptochrome,

Curious, but if you uninstall the Drobo Dashboard (and their SCSI initiator), do you still get I/O errors over Firewire? You should not I would think as I am running just fine on Firewire and eSATA without the Drobo Dashboard.

@cryptochrome,

I looked at the kernel logs and also found I/O errors only when transferring data FROM the Drobo Pro target...

...BUT here's the solution that worked for me:

PROBLEM:

ATTO's iSCSI initiator sends a maximum I/O chunk size of 1mb. Unfortunately, it turns out that the Drobo Pro can't handle an I/O chunk that big. This is most likely the I/O errors that you're seeing. The solution is to chop it down to 512kb.

SOLUTION:

1. Enter this in the command line:
   sudo nvram atto-args-xtendsan="-i0x80000"
2. Restart your mac
3. It should work and not throw I/O errors!

FYI: Keep this command if you ever need to reset your Mac's NVRAM

One other thing that p***** me off: A little birdie told me that Data Robotics is NOT EVEN DONE with their negotiations with ATTO to license the iSCSI intitator. Based on what you heard from Drobo's CEO, it seems like their eta on a bug-free Drobo Dashboard might end up to be an empty promise. I hope that they do get it fixed but I'm not holding my breath.

@Richard:

That worked!!!

Kudos to you for this. I have changed the chunk size as per your instructions and now I don't have a single I/O error anymore.

How did you find that out? Are you working with ATTO (which would also explain your insight information in the ATT/Drobo licensing deal)?

Anyways, despite getting rid of the I/O errors, the performance is quite strange. When reading a single large file off of the Drobo volume (iSCSI) the performance goes up and down, peaking 110 MB/sec and going down to 30 MB/sec. See this screenshot for an illustration:

The destination of this copy process is a 4 disk RAID0 array, so it's not waiting for the destination to finish writing the data. Also, the iSCSI connection is a dedicated one, straight from a Mac Pro separate ethernet interface to the Drobo, no switch. So it can't be the network connection either.

I think this needs some more tweaking. Any thoughts on that?

Again, thank you Richard, you definitely made my day!

@cryptochrome

That's great to hear! The credit for the solution goes to the wizards at ATTO, but the "little birdie" came elsewhere.

I tried to recreate your Drobo's performance issue but didn't experience any dipping. I copied a single 6.65GB file from the DroboPro (8x3TB 7200rpm Hitachi) to a RAID0 array (3x2TB 5200rpm Western Digital):

I had a similar issue a while ago. The cause was a bad drive that was getting 7 times more IO hits than the other drives. It didn't get a "red drive error light" because the drive didn't meet some sort of failure threshold. That info can be found in the Drobo Diagnostics file, although you'll have to ask a Drobo tech to help you read it. They told me the serial number of the drive and, as soon as I removed it, everything was getting spread evenly.

This just truly *****! Talk about being stuck between a rock and a hard place. I am tempted to spend the $200 just to get my Drobo Pro working via iSCSI which I orignally purchased it for. However, I would hate to find out 2 weeks later it was a waste of money becasue Drobo fixed their problem with a new release. The HUGE problem is that Drobo is not being straightforward with their customers. There still is no indication of the problem or what they are working on to fix the problem on their support site. So we are all basically in limbo at this point. I can't for the life of me understand how they can still state that the Drobo Pro is compatible wirh Lion on their FAQ page. This is starting to feel worhty of a class action lawsuit.

Even worse, Drobo Dashboard 1.8.4 on my non-upgraded machines prompts me a couple times/day to upgrade to a solution with a known problem. They could disable their server side notification for users who are likely still stepping into this problem without knowledge of the pitfalls.

@Richard, again, thank you for providing this info. Right now I have no Dashboard installed anymore (plain ATTO) so I can't pull the diagnostics. As soon as I have Dashboard again, I will open a case with Drobo and have them verify that.

@TechUnplugged: I completely agree. It's unbelievable they still tell everyone they are cmopatible with Lion. I guess they don't want to lose any sales. Just sent them an email again, asking why they still don't have any truth on their website.

UPDATE:

Anyone considering buying the ATTO initiator - try to hold it back. I was offered a beta version of the Drobo Dashboard today which will work with the ATTO initiator. I don't have any more information yet, but it seems they are making some progress. I don't know whether they already bundle the ATTO with Dashboard or whether they simply use the ATTO initiator that is already installed.

Anyways, it might be worth waiting just a little longer (workaround: uninstall your Dashboard and use Firewire 800 for the time being).

I will report back as soon as I received the beta Dashboard. Hang in there.

@cryptochrome: Same issue as most here ... DroboPro (13TB) + Lion +iSCSI has made my circa 2010 DroboPro an expensive brick ... Standing by to hear results of beta DD w/ATTO initiator. No more nails left to bite .... Also contemplating if I should hold off on downgrading to Snow Leopard.

I have the same issue, lion hangs when I use the Drobo on firewire, i've switched to USB but the performance is awful compared with the firewire. Anyone heard anything more from Drobo on this?

Not much. Some help from technicians if you call up - depending on who you end on speaking to. But NO warning information on the website AT ALL about the iSCSI complete incompatibility with Lion. Firewire seems to be reasonable stable if you reset the PRAM on your machine.

Shutdown Drobo (s) using the dashboard or manually using what they say on the site.

Option +Command +P +R at boot - wait for two chimes (make sure you ONLY have a keyboard, mouse and screen attached at this point). The reattach using firewire.

Things seem to be a little more stable if you DON'T run the 2.0.3 Dashboard that seems to cause disconnects and other stability issues.

However, iSCSI is not usable. And I also found that my Drobo S, while it does connect initially using eSATA, very quickly loses connection with Drobo Dashboard running and requires a reboot to be seen again.

My personal advice (at least what I have done) is back up onto a different device. As soon as you feasibly can. Use any firewire or eSATA disk and a clone program like Carbon Copy Cloner, or SuperDuper to mke a copy of your data. Keep it safe. Then wait until Drobo fix the problem.

I have the same issue - I have just stopped backing up form my machines and Drobo FS is just not being used for now as 355days for a backup is a joke.

I am very dissapointed in Drobo as they seem not to acknowledge the on-going issue on their site and it seems like they are saying it is all fixed in Dashboard 2.0.3 & Firmware 1.2.0.

For a premium product like this it is very poor service. I wonder how they will recover from this as a company?

I have a Drobo FS, what a nightmare. Before the firmware update it acted fine. Now it's not even usable. I deleted my sharepoint, after moving all my data off to seperate drives. Renamed it (important point) then started moving data back on the Drobo share. At first it went ok, I thought it was better. Once I got past a gig of data even a few MB took hours to upload. Just text files with notes, maybe ten of them. Hours!?

I used to love having my Drobo FS, now I wish that I never spent the money on it. Maybe I can find some windows user who wants one used. I can't imagine a Mac user wanting anything from Drobo now.