I've had my Drobo for almost a year now. For a year, it's been running happily with four 750GB drives. Data keeps growing, so they eventually became full. Full to the point where the Drobo starts throttling transfer speeds so you know it's time to throw in some more/bigger drives. Well, I put the Drobo to the test and it failed!

I replaced one 750GB drive with a 1.5TB Samsung. Immediately the array started rebuilding (relayout in Drobo-speak). After 3 days it actually completed the relayout successfully. So, it was time to insert another 1.5TB drive in place of an old 750GB. Similar to the first time, relayout began without an issue. Seamless and predictable. This time relayout took 2 days, but after completion the Drobo went berserk. Rebooting, relayout for 30 seconds, rebooting, relayout, reboot, etc.

Luckily, my crucial data is also uploaded to Mozy so I wasn't sweating it too much. I contacted Drobo support and opened a trouble ticket. I was pleasantly surprised to get a response within a couple hours on a weekend. However, by that time I had already removed the 2nd 1.5TB Samsung and shoved a 1.5TB Seagate in its place under the assumption that the Samsung was faulty.

I wasn't shocked when the Seagate relayout finished and the Drobo started its little dance all over again.... this time corrupting the filesystem.

Removing the 2nd 1.5TB drive made the the Drobo workable again in both instances. Of course, with only 3 drives there's no redundancy.

I was able to recover the filesystem (HFS+) only by disabling journaling and running repair from Disk Utilities. Running repair with journaling on constantly failed. Sheesh.

After speaking with Drobo Support on the phone and through their trouble ticket system, they sent me out a replacement Drobo. It arrived today. It's failing in an even more outrageous way where it decides to reboot randomly during relayout.

Now my filesystem is completely hosed, but I was able to get almost everything off the array while waiting for the new Drobo to arrive. I don't know how this story will end, but I'm very skeptical of Drobo devices at this moment. Since two Drobo boxes are failing in a similar fashion with the same disk pack, obviously my disks are screwed up in some way. But, they've only ever been inside my Drobo where they've been serving me well.

Anticipating this day, I've started looking at Drobo alternatives. The most attractive solution looks like running a ZFS raidz array in Ubuntu. But this doesn't allow the array to grow by replacing single disks in the array. This is the main advantage Drobo has, but as you can see it didn't deliver in my case. Is there anything else to consider?