When I last posted here, I had just put a Seagate 1.5 in place of a Samsung 1.5 and it was doing a relayout. Not surprisingly, toward the end of the relayout, the Seagate did the exact same thing. Constant rebooting.

After speaking with Drobo Support, which has been nice and responsive, I was sent a replacement Drobo which arrived yesterday. While I was waiting for the replacement, I was able to copy all my data off the old Drobo. I started-up the replacement Drobo by putting in the 3 drives that have been working in the old one. Hoping the replacement Drobo would properly complete the relayout, I inserted the Seagate 1.5 once the replacement Drobo was up and running.

I will admit that I was surprised when the replacement Drobo started rebooting randomly in the middle of relayout less than 10 minutes into the process. This time, the replacement Drobo completely hosed my filesystem. I don't know if the corruption would have eventually been fixable, but I let Mac OS Disk Utility try to repair it for 4 hours before I finally pulled the plug.

There's no way around it, the Drobo failed me in two key aspects. One is the ability to increase the capacity of an existing array. The second is protecting my data. I think it's inexcusable, but there's not much I can do about it.

Last night I decided to end this pain and reset/reformat the Drobo with the exact same disk pack that it was unable to relayout properly. Naturally, the reset/reformat went on without a hitch and I now have the healthy, larger array I was after.

I don't know if I'm still a fan of Drobo. The features are great compared to traditional RAID arrays, but those features completely failed to deliver when put to the test. Right now, my data is being copied back to my old Drobo. If I decide to keep the Drobo as my primary storage, you can bet I'll have a full backup before attempting a disk swap in the future. I really suggest you do the same.