{"id":663,"date":"2015-06-17T22:16:08","date_gmt":"2015-06-18T03:16:08","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.thegatesofdawn.ca\/wordpress\/?p=663"},"modified":"2021-04-13T00:12:31","modified_gmt":"2021-04-13T05:12:31","slug":"drobo-fs-reliability","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.thegatesofdawn.ca\/wordpress\/posts\/2015\/06\/17\/drobo-fs-reliability\/","title":{"rendered":"Drobo FS reliability"},"content":{"rendered":"

Years ago I bought a Drobo FS (no longer made, but more-or-less equivalent to the Drobo 5N<\/a> they sell today.)\u00a0 It’s a nice little package using Drobo’s very easy-to-use RAID system, combined with a Linux-based file-server.\u00a0 Drobo gave it the ability to have other applications installed on it (they call them DroboApps<\/a>).\u00a0 I installed rsync<\/a>, so that I could use it (with the magical “–link-dest” option) to do Time Machine<\/a>-like backups of my desktop Windows PC.\u00a0 Once I got this all working, I was delighted… for about a week.<\/p>\n

Then the Drobo started making my life miserable.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

Sometimes, in the middle of a backup, rsync would start failing.\u00a0 Every file copied would fail, with a “read-only file system” error.\u00a0 Meanwhile, the Drobo’s network share itself would be gone from the network, and the connection to Drobo Dashboard was gone.\u00a0 The box itself appeared to be fine, nothing weird going on.\u00a0 But it would be dead to the outside world, and would not come back until it was power-cycled.<\/p>\n

This kept happening.\u00a0 Over and over.\u00a0 I tried all kinds of debugging strategies, using a remote shell (which still worked) to try to get the file-system to work again, to look for resource leaks or anything that might explain the problem.\u00a0 Tried rebuilding newer versions of rsync from source and installing those.\u00a0 Nothing worked.\u00a0 I worked for a while with Drobo support, which was a generally unsatisfying experience.\u00a0 They never gave me anything beyond the usual “unsupported third-party software” run-around.<\/p>\n

So, my very expensive Drobo FS was basically completely unusable for the primary purpose for which I had bought it.\u00a0 I stopped using it for backups, instead I installed an rsync package on my antiquated (and much less expensive) Western Digital MyBook World box (which has been happily receiving my backups ever since).\u00a0 I still kept the Drobo running as a media server for XBMC.\u00a0 But even in that much reduced role, it sucked.\u00a0 Every time I wanted to fire up XBMC, the Drobo would be crashed again.<\/p>\n

I spent the last few years impotently cursing the miserable overpriced piece of shit and swearing I’d never buy another Drobo product, or recommend one to anybody.<\/p>\n

Then something changed.<\/p>\n

All this time, I had had the Drobo FS plugged into a UPS.\u00a0 I recently had reason to make some changes, and the Drobo ended up plugged into the wall, no UPS.\u00a0 And it’s stopped crashing!\u00a0 It’s suddenly and miraculously become rock-fucking-solid, I swear to God.<\/p>\n

My guess is that the Drobo’s power-supply really doesn’t like the “modified sine wave” output from the UPS.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Years ago I bought a Drobo FS (no longer made, but more-or-less equivalent to the Drobo 5N they sell today.)\u00a0 It’s a nice little package using Drobo’s very easy-to-use RAID system, combined with a Linux-based file-server.\u00a0 Drobo gave it the ability to have other applications installed on it (they call them DroboApps).\u00a0 I installed rsync, […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[4],"tags":[116,117,118,115,119],"class_list":["post-663","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-tech","tag-backups","tag-drobo","tag-drobo-fs","tag-rsync","tag-ups"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.thegatesofdawn.ca\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/663"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.thegatesofdawn.ca\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.thegatesofdawn.ca\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.thegatesofdawn.ca\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.thegatesofdawn.ca\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=663"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/www.thegatesofdawn.ca\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/663\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":765,"href":"https:\/\/www.thegatesofdawn.ca\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/663\/revisions\/765"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.thegatesofdawn.ca\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=663"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.thegatesofdawn.ca\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=663"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.thegatesofdawn.ca\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=663"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}