Drobo Firewire 800 issues with OS X Server Mavericks...

I dont have OSX Server, but I do have Mavericks installed with a gen 2 Drobo connected via FW 800 to my 2009 mac mini. I too have noticed slow booting, and that Finder seems to stall when booting for a minute or two when OSX starts. During this time it will be as if Finder has locked up and I cant open a Finder window. Your problem sounds worse than mine as you have so many FW devices.

From what I gather changing to USB connection may be a workaround, but you would lose the ability to daisychain and have slower file transfers.

Hello All!

I've been having the same slow boot issues since Mountain Lion. I'm running a Late 2008 MacBoot Pro (yeah, she's on her last legs!) with two Drobos Gen 2 4-bays connected via Firewire. More seriously, I experience complete system lock up when copying files to the Drobo or between. This started under Mountain Lion, but is much worse on Mavericks. In fact Carbon Copy Cloner cannot complete a backup from one Drobo to another and I cannot copy anything over a few hundred MBs from the MBP to Drobo.

I've found I have a slightly better chance if the machine is not accessing the Drobo while doing the copy. So, I stop Parallels and CrashPlan, but not much luck. It's very frustrating as I'm currently trying to buy a new iMac or Mac Pro. A new external array isn't really in the budget right now.

Watching this thread closely!

Best,

Rob

Any luck with this?

I'm having similar issues with my single Drobo Gen. 2. connected via FireWire.

What I've noticed is that this often happens when I modify large chunks of data. Right before my recent bout of issues with my Drobo, I had copied 250GB of data from an external drive to my Drobo. The rebuild process has completed, but then all my issues started.

As of right now, my Drobo mounts, but it's slowed to an unuseable speed.

How full is your Drobo? Once it reaches a certain capacity the Drobo slows itself down significantly

My Drobo is only 80% full, which isn't anywhere near the 95% capacity that the slowdown usually happens with.

I've tried switching from Firewire (+ Firewire to Thunderbolt adapter) to just USB. I've tried resinstalling Drobo Dashboard. I've tried uninstalling Drobo Dashboard. I've tried turning off the Drobo, removing the drives, powering it on and off, and then placing the drives back in and powering on. No results.

To give you an idea of how slow it's behaving, right now I have the Drobo plugged into my computer via USB 2.0. An attempt to transfer 8GB worth of data from the Drobo to my Mac's internal SSD (Samsung 840 Pro, which has an average of 500MBps read and write), Finder says it will take "about 2 days".

The only thing I haven't been able to try is taking my data off and reformatting the drives. If 8GB takes 2 days, imagine how long the rest of my nearly 3TB of data will take to relocate.

I have been having this issue for a couple months now. I am running a new Mac Mini (yes, with only a 5200 rpm internal drive, for now), 16GB of RAM and a Drobo 2nd Gen hooked up via FireWire800. I have 4, 1 TB Western Digital Black Caviar Drives in the Drobo, with about 50GB free space. The only things on the drives are media files, most play fine still, ONE they ever start. Even reading the diretory listings through Finder are slow. Any ideas?

Most of the time the problem is that you exceed the capacity of a Drobo system without knowing : it is by default a 16TB Raidset (BeyondRAID) even it can only hold 3TB's of data for example.

You can expand its capacity but I've seen many peolple thinuing having 16TB of storage where they can only store 2TB of data (safe mode).(depending how many disks you have, with which capacity)

I don't have to explain that you run into problems when you exceed the data your disks can hold ...

Please doublecheck this with the disks you have inside and compare what your total capacity seems to be ... and how many dfata you've already written to the Drobo

@Wannes: I have 1.94TB of used space. I have a total of 4TB in the Drobo (4, 1TB drives). So I am close to full.

Probably you've already exceeded your storage space. Just take a look in the Drobo Dashboard and see if that's the problem ...

P.S. I've seen many people rendering all their files corrupt doing this

So I have some updates.

I contacted Data Robotics and sent them several diagnostic files from my device. It turns out that 2 of my drives had bad sectors on them, but since they hadn't failed completely, the Drobo didn't flag the red lights (VERY annoying).

I have no way of knowing if your issue is the same as mine, but knowing that your Drobo won't flag drives with Bad Sectors should at least give you one potential avenue to investigate.

Unfortunately, I had no way of knowing which drives were failing (or that any drives were failing in general) without sending several Diagnostic Files to Data Robotics. You can generate these from Drobo Dashboard. Through these Diag files they were able to see what drives were causing issues.

It's worth a shot to reach out to them and have them look. I'm glad I did, and they helped me even though I wasn't in warranty anymore.

So what did they have you do to fix the drives? Or do you have to replace them entirely?

I am having the same issue! I am running the newest version of Mavericks on my new Mac Mini (newest available). I have 16GB of RAM and still just the slow 5400rpm hard drive that came with it. The only thing on my 2nd generation Drobo are media files. I have 4, 1TB WD Caviar Black drives in the Drobo. I am currently at 69% full. Nowhere near the 95% full slow down.

I replaced the 1st drive with a 2TB WD Cavir Black drive, then found out I will need to buy another 2TB drive to get extra storage space becuase of the way Drobo handles storage and data protection. :/

I did have the Drobo plugged into the USB port for a while and it seemed to work better and MUCH MUCH faster than when connected to the Firewire 800. This just started happening since the upgrade to Mavericks. Ebcuase my Drobo was running fast, just like a regular hard drive. Not anymore. Somethign is wrong.

What utility can you can the drives in your Drobo for bad sectors?

Any other advice? Has anyone reported this issue to Apple?

My drives were dying, which is why I experienced a performance lag. They just hadn't died all the way, and so Drobo didn't alert me (which is the frustrating part). Getting those out of my Drobo is what allowed me to see it perform normally.

@ Phunkae: There's nothing that could be done other than swap out the drives for new ones.

@ Randynchicago: I would contact Data Robotics if I were you, send them several diagnostic files, and they may be able to let you know which (if any) of your drives are failing. There is no application that you can use to diagnose a drive with bad sectors unfortunately. Don't bother contacting Apple, as it's not their issue.

I did not find any utility to check the hard drives, but I did send in my Drobo Diagnostics logfile and they informed me of Drive 3 being bad and bad sectors growing - one reason it was in data protection so often. Even though I am not in warranty and 2nd Generation is no longer supported, the tech rep is trying to get a level 2 tech to assist me with the problems I am having.

Drobe tech support is pretty decent! 🙂 I get responses from them quickly and all the time, even though I do not have a warranty! Good customer service makes a product worth it, IMHO.