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

I am experiencing the exact same issues here. My 2nd generation Drobo attached via FireWire is causing my iMac to be extremely slow at boot up (and shut down).

I have not tried switching to USB as yet, but might give that a try.

I contacted Drobo support for assistance, but my experience with them was the opposite to what you had. They told me my Drobo is out of warranty and is no longer supported.

Their suggestion to my problem was to buy a new Drobo or to pay for additional support. Very unhappy with that unhelpful suggestion. The Drobo is less than 3 years old, but they will not provide any assistance.

Whilst my Drobo has been great over the past 2 and a bit years, I will not be buying Drobo again.

I'm having similar performance issues with my 2nd Gen Drobo.
I've got it hooked up by FW800 to a Mac Mini which I haven't upgraded to Mavericks yet because I'd heard about issues with things like this. I'm still having the slowness problem under Mountain Lion though.
I use the Drobo for all my media storage; a big iTunes library and a big Aperture library. Aperture is basically ususable now it takes so long to load albums or individual pictures. iTunes sometimes fails to connect via home sharing, presumably because it times out waiting for the Drobo to spin up. Sometimes when I wake the machine from sleep, the wallpaper is plain grey because the photo that I've set as wallpaper hasn't been retrieved from the Drobo (odd that it doesn't get copied to the system folder when you set it).

From reading this post, I think my best option is going to be to buy a new FW drive and spend days copying everything from the Drobo to it. Then I'll retire the Drobo and probably try to offload it on craigslist or somewhere.

When searching this problem, I did find an old article from Mac Performance Guide which said that the Drobo FW performance was the worst they'd ever tested - slower than USB 2.0... I only wish I'd seen that before I went down this path..!

Yeah, I hate to say it, but I solved the problem by moving back to USB. I was having hang-up/performance problems with my MBP under Mavericks. My MBP finally died after 5 years of hard use and I upgraded to the latest MBP. I'm now using a thunderdolt dock and USB 2 for the Drobos and they've never worked better. I even think they're faster! Under firewire, I was never able to do large file copies without the MBP completely hanging up. Now, it's not a problem. I've even edited RAW files stored on the Drobo (where I archive my photo library) and it's not that bad!

Give it a try with USB and see how it works out. I'm not thrilled with the solution, but it works. Until I have the coin for a nice TB array, I'll stick with the Drobos. They're paid for. 🙂

Rob

I'd love to add to this disucssion but I'm not sure how different my case is. Perhaps providing my deals might help but at the very least maybe it'll key into there being some sort of real problem with so many people having issues.

I'm on a Mac (circa 2009) 16gb mem 6 gig harddrive space (2 x 2 TB, 2 x 1TB). My Drobo is second gen had it for 3 years. it's got 4 x 2TB harddrives. Currently about 1.5 TB space USED.

The Drobo worked beautifully until roughly about four months ago. Then.

1. Slow. Beyond slow. When I copy 25 GB of data took almost 30 hours. I just timed opening a new finder window in the Drobo and it's taken roughly to open. Also, when I open a folder, it will oftentimes freeze everything else in the finder. Like Drag Thing immediately freezes up, the Finder (Not Responding), Preview (Not Responding) but if I hard disconnect the cable (USB/Firewire doesn't matter tried both) I get the 'didn't disconnect drive appropriately warning but the Finder and everythign else unfreeze and start working again IMMMEDIATELY. When I empty the trash it takes almost 25 minutes to empty the 25GB I just copied off of it and then deleted.

2. All the above is only relevant WHEN it mounts. Sometimes it does. Sometimes it doesn't. Sometimes it shows up in Dashboard, sometimes in doesn't. Sometimes it takes 10 minutes to mount. Sometimes I come back after about 2 hours and it still hasn't mounted.

3. I have run a bazillion sorts of diagnositcs (both Tech Tools 7 and Disk Utility). When I can get the disk recognized it and give it the unbelievable amount of time to do the command (last time I ran Disk Utilities, Repair Permissiosn it tood over a day to do) it always comes back CLEAN. Everything normal. (see Image 1)

4. Did I mention slow. When Dashboard actually recognizes it (probably about 30% of the time) here's what I get. Please take note of the Data Protection in progress time to completion.

5. As to troubleshooting not mentioned above. I've done the whole reset thing. Shut down. Pull drives. Walk away, come back, reinsert. Boot up and let run. I started the most recent session of that on Mar 31. It is now Apr 14. That message above is what I got three days ago.

6. Lastly, support hasn't been optimal. I understand my Drobo is past it's prime. (2011 fall is when I picked it up) but support has been just as slow as the Drobo. I literally get an eamil at about 5 pm everyday. I immediatelly respond to it by completely whatever SINGLE step they've asked me to do and then hit send. The next day same thing at 5 pm. This has literally been going on until about Apr 5 when they told me it can take several days for the size of the info I have on my disk to restore. So I waited. Thne on Apr 9 I got an email that said if I hadn't responded to them in a while they were going to close my ticket out. Was not really happy about the fact that they told me to wait and then when I did they tell me their closing my ticket. So I emailed them with my disattisfaction of the whole situation and I did get an apologize saying that it was an automated response (didn't look like that, looked like all the other emails I got from them so I had no idea of knowing.) And now we're going on 15 days.

I was ready to just bag it, pull the harddrives and install them in my mac to see if I could get at the info in them when I read this thread. This lets me know it's not just my computer. There's defintiely an ISSUE here that I think needs to be addressed.

Thanks.

Michael

Michael,

It looks like you are having pretty much the same problems that I had with my Drobo. I was getting no support from Drobo Technical Support (other than telling me to buy a new Drobo). In the end I replaced my Drobo with a Synology DiskStation.

I was experiencing:

1. Very slow Drobo. - It took 26 hours to do my regular CarbonCopyCloner (CCC) of my iMac. When I did the exact same CCC on my USB 2.0 Western Digital MyBook, it took 5 hours. On my new Synology DiskStation the same CCC took 90 minutes.

2. Startup and shutdown of my iMac would take 10-15 minutes. Once my Drobo was removed, my iMac now starts and shuts down in under 1 minute.

3. I ran all the normal repair tools as well (Tech Tools Pro, Drive Genius etc) to run repairs on the Drobo. I ran each test 4 times (to match the number of drives I had installed). Each run would take 8 hours or so. It seemed to make the Drobo quicker for a little while but soon resorted back to the old slow Drobo again after a day or so.

4. I ended up copying all of my data to my Synology and was going to keep the Drobo as a backup. I then removed one of my Drives out to put into my Synology. I only have 3TB of actual data on my Drobo so thought the Data Protection process would be pretty quick. It has been running for 24 hours and claims it will take another 426 hours to complete!

Something obviously broke with Drobo when Mavericks came out, but Drobo have opted not to fix the problem and instead seem to be relying on people upgrading to one of their newer models.

As mentioned, this was too much for me and I upgraded to a device other than Drobo. I will never buy Drobo again.

Andrew

I don't think it's just related to Mavericks. I put Mavericks on my laptop, but not the Mac Mini that the Drobo is attached to. I seem to be having a lot of the same issues as other people here, so I wonder if it's just an ageing thing with the Drobo firmware or software.

I've read some mixed reviews about the Synology units too. There are multiple models and it seems that you need to by the mid to upper range models to get good performance. Mind you, anything would be faster than the Drobo..!

It might not be Mavericks related, but it is definitely something which Drobo should be investigating or working on. I don't think it is fair to stop supporting a item which is under 3 years old. I was really happy with my Drobo when I first purchased it, but the degrading performance and lack of support has been terrible.

I ended up buying a Synology DiskStation DS1513+ (so one of the higher end models). So far it has been great, and super fast. The speed difference between the Synology and the Drobo is night and day.

I agree. I thought the Drobo was great when I first got it but their customer service wasn't, even at the start.

FWIW, I had similar poor customer service from File Transporter - over blown claims about what their product could do and slow response to customer service tickets. I ended up returning that device. Maybe not coincidence that they were ex- (and are now re-) Data Robotics people...

I'll look at the Synology model you mentioned Andrew, but from what I remember, they're significantly more expensive. I think if I change my computing habits slightly, I probably don't even need a NAS.

The DiskStation I purchased was slightly more expensive than the Drobo it replaced.

I am in Australia, so the prices would not be the same but my Drobo (second generation) cost me $749 in 2011. I just purchased the DiskStation for $829 so only slightly more.

I like the fact that i have gone NAS rather than DAS as I now no longer need to have my iMac turned on if I want to access a file. This has particularly been great when getting media to watch on my Apple TV or iPad.

I still have my drobo, so would like it if it worked and the problems fixed, but I am not holding my breath.

Andrew

Some helpful info thanks. I"m looking into the DiskStation stuff now.

My biggest quesiton for you since our situations seem vastly similar is how did you get your data of your Drobo. I have tried so many times. A number of days ago I got one folder (25 GB) but it took almost an hour/GB to transfer. I have two other folders (each about 100GB) and the two times I've tried to transfer one of them it says it's going to take several weeks to transfer. Then invariably it slows to such a crawl that it isn't even transfering.

These 3 folders by the way were intransit to being archived and all of this happened while I was doing it.

I also have about 3 folders of roughly 2 TB of info but it's pure backup. Roughtly about 40000 files or so. I thought it might speed the drobo up if I just deleted them, to clean it off so that the Data Protection didn't have to work so long and when I came back to it a day later it literally had deleted 400 files.

How did you get your data off your Drobo?

Hi Michael,

Not sure if I can help as I was able to get my data off my Drobo (just very slowly). I just copied files across from my Drobo to my Synology. The transfer speed was not great (about 10-15mbs) and I just let it go from there. It took days for the entire copy process to complete.

The one thing I did do (but not sure if you are able to do this) was I connected my Drobo to my MacBook Air (rather than my iMac) and I connected via USB rather than Firewire when I did the copy. I did not have Drobo Dashboard installed (so the Drobo just looked like a normal hard drive). It seemed to be quicker at copying data (but that may have been my imagination), but that may just be because I was not doing anything else with my MacBook Air at the time (whilst my iMac is usually doing something).

My Data Protection process had not progressed following a further 24 hours, so I aborted the process. Once I aborted it, the Drobo would no longer mount and I had to reformat the hard drives in the Drobo (I was not too fussed as I had all my data copied to the DiskStation).

Not sure if any of this helps though.

Simply put, Drobo tech support told me to deal with the fact that older Drobos do not work well with Maverick. They suggest buying new products and swap the drives inside. Before I came to this honest answer, I had to be on the phone for 3 days with Drobo support, and Apple support--which they explained the inner workings of maverick in a much better way. Drobo blamed it on other issues ranging from corruption to cables.

Buying more Drobos? Probably not! I'm going to invest my time and money on a more reliable system that can be used for much longer, and that is more universally accepted. Drobo really lost me me with the lack of support for all of their products. I'm sure that a simple firmware upgrade would fix problems. However, clearly there is not willingness to care from Data robotics.

Goodbye Drobo.

Yep. Screw Drobo. I have 8TB of data that Drobo tells me they can't help me with because it's end of life, or no longer supported. Whatever. There should be a law that if you make a product, you support it. For a REASONABLE period of time. Not using lack of support to generate new sales, that doesn't work, it just ****** us off.

But I digress...

The bigger issue I am having under Maverics / Drobo is losing connection mysteriously to the drobo. Funny thing is, it seems to happen most when Final Cut Pro has been running for a while.

I am sharing the Drobo volume, and have it set to NOT power down drives in system prefs for obvious reasons.

But sometimes, the drobo will just mysteriously lose the FW connection, and go away, which causes all sorts of havoc on my network

Aggravating.