Author Archives: allenhuffman

Drobo volumes lose their names in Drobo Dashboard

Hey, other Drobo owners… Have you ever seen this happen?

Where, oh where have my Drobo volume names gone?

My volumes all have custom names, but occasionally I see Drobo Dashboard only show them as “Drobo”. I believe they always still show up as their proper names to Mac OS X, but Drobo Dashboard seems to have a problem reading them.

I have seen this on a 2nd generation Drobo, a 3rd generation Drobo, and on my brand new Drobo 5C (the second day I had it hooked up). I have seen it hooked to three different computers (all Macs) via FireWire, USB 2.0 and now USB 3.0.

I contacted Drobo support about this, and they asked me the typical list of support questions, which makes me wonder if I’m the only one this happens to.

Anyone else seen this happen?

Drobo (3rd gen) to Drobo 5C, part 2

This is part of a multi-part review of the Data Robotics Drobo 5C.

See also: Introduction and part 1.

Previously, I discussed the unboxing and setup of the new Drobo 5C. Today, I will walk through the migration process from an older 3rd generation 4-bay Drobo to this new 5-bay model.

Setting up Drobo 5C is no different than the previous models… Plug in the power cable, plug in the USB cable, insert drives, then turn it on.

Since the topic of this article is migrating from a 3rd gen model to the 5C, here are some important additional comments:

  1. APPLY FIRMWARE UPDATES FIRST. The code that came on my 5C was already out of date. The first thing you should do it hook up new new Drobo (with no drives inserted!) and power it on. Run the Drobo Dashboard software and it should recognize the new Drobo, and offer to update the firmware (if an update is available). Allow this to happen, and for the unit to reboot and be seen by Drobo Dashboard.
  2. Next, you want to power down the new Drobo, and move the “drive pack” (all the drives used together) from the previous Drobo to this one. DO NOT HAVE THE UNIT POWERED ON WHEN YOU INSERT THE HARD DRIVES! If you do this, the Drobo will see the drive inserted, and format it. You must have the new Drobo powered off, and then insert all the drives at the same time, then power it up. The Drobo should boot, then recognize the drives and have the same name and volume(s) you saw on the old Drobo.
  3. FOLLOW THE INSTRUCTIONS GIVEN ON THE DROBO WEBSITE! Don’t trust some random stranger’s website… The information I gave you may be incorrect and cause the total end of life as we know it.

Mine seemed to have some problem and it was not recognized by the computer after I did this. I had to power it down, and start it up again. It mounted just fine after that, and it showed up with the same device name and volume names since all of the information is contained on the drive pack itself.

At this point, the new 5-bay Drobo should act exactly the same as the former 4-bay model.

My next goal was to enable dual disk redundancy. When I looked at the Drobo Dashboard, the option to enable this was grayed out. I suppose that makes sense. My unit was quite full and there probably wouldn’t have been enough free space to make a third copy of all my data. However, my understanding is that as long as there is enough space available, you could switch over to dual disk redundancy. (But I may be misunderstanding.)

To get the needed space, I acquired a brand new 3TB Western Digital Red hard drive.

NOTE: When I get a new hard drive, I like to first zero-byte format the entire drive. By writing to every sector of the new drive, any severe problems can be located. I would rather spend the hours it takes to do this, than blindly put in a new drive only to find out it had some severe issue far at the end of the drive which doesn’t show up until months (or years) later when the drive finally fills up to the bad spot. (Yes, I have found bad drives this way, but only two so far.)

After I plugged in the new device, as expected, the option for dual disk redundancy was available:

Drobo 5C dual disk redundancy option.

I checked it, and the drive began the long process of migrating data so every bit existed on three different drives (thus, two could fail, and data would still be protected):

Drobo 5C rebuilding for dual disk redundancy.

It initially stay it would take over 40 hours to do this, but it was actually completed in about 24 hours. The newer Drobos certainly handle rebuilding much faster than the early models which could take all week even with much smaller hard drives.

The end result was a new Drobo with a few more volumes available and some extra peace-of-mind.

To be continued…

 

Drobo (3rd gen) to Drobo 5C, part 1

This is part of a multi-part review of the Data Robotics Drobo 5C.

See also: Introduction

Drobo 5C box.

I have received my Drobo 5C unit which I will be using for this review. Much like the 3rd generation model, the 5C comes packaged in a large white Drobo box, with the unit itself wrapped in a cloth shopping bag protected by two foam inserts. In the top of the box is another smaller box which contains the paperwork, power supply, power cable, and a USB to USB-C cable.

Data Robotics does a nice job at packaging their products. It’s not quite on the level of Apple, but fairly close.

Let’s take a look inside the box…

Drobo 5C box and contents.

Drobo 5C accessories: USB cable, power cable, and power supply.

Drobo 5C quick start guide (inside of the removable cover of the small box).

Since the 5C can hold five hard drives, it is about one inch taller than the previous model. Here is the 5C (left) compared to the 3rd generation model (right):

Drobo 5C vs Drobo (3rd gen).

Please excuse the protective plastic covering you see on my drives. I tend to keep it on things I buy to protect them, so when I sell them later it is still in “like new” shape.  (I do remove any plastic that would cover air vents or similar.)

The first thing I noticed was that the 5C case is a different design. While similar looking, instead of being a sleek case where the front and back are flush to the metal casing, the new model seems to just be a metal casing, with the front and rear inset a bit with a gap running all around them. This seems like a step back, cosmetically. It just doesn’t look as sleek as the past incarnations, and the gap seems like it would be even more places for dust to collect.

You can also see that the blue capacity lights are now along the bottom of the enclosure, and no longer behind the removable front cover. I always throught the “show through” lights were a nice touch, so I am sad to see them go. BUT, in the previous Drobos I had, there were two additional lights hidden behind the front panel: power and data transfer. I would sometimes have to remove the front panel to see if the Drobo was locked up, or if the data transfer light was flickering. Function wise, being able to see these without removing the panel is a plus.

Here is a photo of the two units with the front covers removed:

Drobo 5C vs Drobo (3rd gen) – front panel removed.

You can see that the drives start a bit lower than in the old model, which is why the unit can hold an additional drive and not be as tall as you might expect. You can see the two “hidden” lights on my old Drobo, that now appear at the far left and far right of the new Drobo 5C.

In the next part, we’ll take a look at moving drives over from the old Drobo to the new 5C, and see what it takes to activate the Dual Disk Redundancy feature.

More to come…

 

Drobo (3rd gen) to Drobo 5C, introduction

My long history with external hard drives was covered in an earlier article, so I will just summarize:

I’ve gone through a bunch of hard drives and external enclosures since 1999.

Last year I shared a multi-part series about migrating from a 2nd generation Drobo to the newer 3rd generation models. The 3rd generation version solved most of the performance issues, especially when it came to the time it took to rebuild after replacing a drive. It also added a very important capability: Dual Disk Redundancy

See: What is Dual Disk Redundancy?

This is very important because, without it, when (not if!) a drive fails, during the time it takes to rebuild on to a new drive, any other drive failure will cause loss of data. With drives becoming larger and larger (I upgraded mine, rebuild time also increases. If you buy multiple drives at the same time, you increase the likelihood of getting multiple units that have the same flaw from a bad production run, which increases the odds of a multi-drive failure.

It may seem unlikely, but from reading many articles about RAID systems over the years, it’s far more common that I would have thought.

I have worked around this over the years by always having multiple drives and backing up my important data between them. Thus, on my two Drobos, I have my most important data copied to each unit. This way, even if a Drobo completely died on me, I still have my data on the other one. (It’s also good to have backup hardware in case of a failure. I can swap my drives to the still-working unit and get to anything I need while I wait for the failed unit to be repaired/replaced.)

Of course, this doubles the hardware cost…

With Dual Disk Redundancy, you can set up a Drobo to protect data in a much better way. Normally, every bit of data exists on two drives/ if one drive fails, there is always a another copy. With Dual Disk Redundancy, the data will exist on three drives, so if two fail, you still have a copy.

The problem is … you lose storage space. A 4-bay Drobo filled with four 3 TB drives gives you 8.17 TB of storage for data. If you enable Dual Disk Redundancy, it drops to only having 5.44 TB available. You can see this at the Drobo Capacity Calculator:

Capacity Calculator

When the 3rd generation Drobo came out, they added Dual Disk Redundancy support, but if you were migrating from an earlier 4-bay unit, you could not make use of it unless you had enough free space available.

At some point, Drobo also started making 5-bay units,. This allowed you to have as much storage as a 4-bay offered WITH Dual Disk Redundancy enabled.

The problem is, those 5-bay units were expensive! A 3rd generation 4-bay Drobo sold for $299 or so, while a 5-bay direct-attached drive was $699! That’s quite the premium just to get one extra drive bay.

This changed last October when Drobo announced the new Drobo 5C.

Drobo Releases World’s First Self-Managing USB-C Storage Solution

At $349, it’s a much better value. It ONLY has a USB-C port, and comes with a cable to plug that in to a USB 2.0/3.0 port on your PC/Mac, so if you preferred Thunderbolt, SATA or FireWire, you are out of luck.

I will soon be receiving a unit to review, and will begin a multi-part article about migrating from a 4-bay Drobo to the new 5-bay 5C model.

More to come…

 

More tech whiners: Dongles

Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it. – George Santayana

Tech pundits are complaining about new Macs that only come with a USB-C port. “We have to have dongles for everything!” And the sky is falling.

I think back to 1998, when the original Bondi blue iMac came it. It had no floppy drive. It has no parallel printer port. It had no RS232 serial port. It had no ADB (some kind of Apple port; I never had any Apple stuff before the iMac so it meant nothing to me).

To hook up a modem, you needed a USB adapter (much more than just a dongle).

To hook up a parallel printer, you needed a USB adapter.

To hook up a SCSI hard drive, or a serial mouse, or an ADB accessory, or anything else … you needed a USB adapter.

And I remember that the Tech Whiners whined about this back then, too. And there was pain. USB adapters were expensive and sparse.

But today, USB is on everything. No more dongles are needed.

You know what I bet? I bet USB-C will do that same thing, and soon everything will just be USB-C.

We’ve been down this road before, folks.

Can you imagine how many different ports you’d need on your Mac (or PC) if this had not happened? I guess that’s what the Tech Whiners want…

Next time … keyboards.

Tech whiners and the iPhone headphone jack. Plus, big phones.

I have listened to tech whiners for years, and am always amused at how wrong they end up being when the rest of the world ignores all their concerns and embraces something that “can’t possibly work.” Tech whiners said the iPod was a stupid idea (I think I would have agreed – who would spend that kind of money to play music?). Tech whiners said the iPhone was a stupid idea (I disagreed on that one; I’d been using a “smart phone” PDA without a physical keyboard since 2000 and was hooked). Tech whiners said Apple Store was a stupid idea (I might have agreed on that one, but knew the other solutions – store-within-a-store at CompUSA – were stupider ideas). And the list goes on and on.

Now I have to listen to pundits bitch and moan over Apple removing the headphone jack from the iPhone 7. Well, I don’t have to, but it will be difficult to escape it. Whine whine whine about needing an adapter.

Guess what? This is nothing new. Every pair of nice “real” headphones I have — you know, the full size ones you use when music matters, or when you are doing music recording — have 1/4″ headphone jacks. Those are/were industry standard. In the olden days, they plugged directly in to my multi-track cassette recorder, then later my Roland VS-880 hard disk recorder, and anything else I had.

In modern days, my MacBook has a 1/8″ jack, and since GarageBand (was that also a stupid idea?) has killed all my old recording tech, I had to get a cheap adapter from Radio Shack (back when it still had the space in the name) to make this possible. Thus, I kept all five pair of my old headphones, and have an adapter so I can keep using them on modern equipment with the tiny, fragile (and far easier to snap/break) 1/8″ headphone jack.

And guess what? That adapter has been on the end of my big headphones for the past decade. I have never lost it. You just leave it there.

Problem solved.

Whine, whine, whine, but this is how audio folks have done things for decades. Apple gives you an adapter with the new iPhone, so just plug it in to the headphones you’d normally use and you are done. “What if I lose my headphones?” You no longer need the adapter 😉
Yep, if you lose something, you lose it. How is that Apple’s (or Radio Shack, or Samsung, or Disney) fault?

Whiners amuse me.

BONUS: I hear so many people complain about how bulky these big phones are because they “won’t fit in my pocket.” Guess what? Years ago, all phones were big. They came with (or sold separately) cases that had belt clips. You carried your phone on your belt, and you never sat on the phone and bent it, and you never sat down and had it hurt your stomach.

This problem was solved long ago. Thing of all the phones that could have been saved from broken screens or being bent or even lost because people constantly set them down … If they just kept them on their belt.

Oh, but that would be tacky. Strange, we do a bunch of tacky things every day now, but since “everyone does it” no one seems to be bothered by it.

Millions of dollars a year of damaged and lost phones might be eliminated if folks would use the solution we had twenty years ago…

But, hey, whining is fun.

Apple’s hold music, and Apple Care+ procedure.

Many things that are very simple and obvious ideas were, at one time, uncommon or non-existent. Obviously a touch screen display makes sense today, but perhaps not so much before the iPhone was introduced in 2007. Anyone who ever used the then state-of-the-art World Key Information kiosks at E.P.C.O.T. in 1982 knows that touch screens have been around for decades, but multi-touch was one of those breakthroughs that we take for granted and expect today.

I recently called Apple and ran in two things I had not encountered before but was such an obvious idea I expect everyone is doing it this way and I just did not know.

First … Their automated system, when informing me there would be a short wait for a representative, gave me a choice of three types of hold music, or silence. I could choose modern pop songs, classical, or jazz.
I know I am not the only one who has made jokes about lousy or annoying hold music. By giving the caller some choices (including “none”), that problem has disappeared.

I don’t know who invented this now-obvious concept, but I will now always associate it with an Apple experience.

And second … After speaking to the representative, instead of him asking me for a credit card number (which I always hate reading out aloud in a public space), he informed me that a link was sent to my e-mail and I could complete the process securely through the website.

What? No more whispering trying to read a credit card number quietly so my cubical neighbor can’t write it down and order pizza using it? What an obvious idea when calling in about a device that does e-mail.

I expect everyone does it this way, now, and I have just been under a rock. Or maybe this is new and exciting. Either way, hold music and phone transactions will never been the same for me moving forward.

On a related side note, the Apple Care procedure is very streamlined these days. To verify a device’s qualification, you can read the serial number to the automated robot, or key press in the EMEI number (if it’s a phone/data device). That let the system know about my device and tell me it’s warranty status over the phone. When the rep answered, they already knew what device I was calling about. And, when they wanted to see if my device was qualified, they had me go in to a Settings/Privacy section and a new link appeared (initiated by Apple support) which let me run diagnostics and (with my approval) share it with Apple. They were then able to tell “stuff” about my device – probably if it had detected drops or damage.

Fascinating.

I’m going back to my rock now. All this change in one phone call is more than I can handle right now.

Another Apple difference…

I was shocked when I found an item from Apple that appeared to be in one of those plastic blister packs. I absolutely hate these things — it seems I have to tear the cardboard apart to get the memory card or whatever out of the package, forever ruining it. For anything pricy or significant, I like to keep the original packaging around so I can still have it when I sell the item later on e-Bay 😉

Why would Apple do this?

Is Apple really using a "blister pack" style package that you have to tear apart to get the product out?

Is Apple really using a “blister pack” style package that you have to tear apart to get the product out?

Before I began to tear in to the cardboard, I flipped it over to see what I was up against. It appears Apple had a better way. On the back was a hole to get the item out with a piece of plastic covering it. There was a small tab on one end which made it easy to pull…

Flipping the package over reveals Apple included an access hole, covered in a small sticker with a tab to use to pull it off.

Flipping the package over reveals Apple included an access hole, covered in a small sticker with a tab to use to pull it off.

The plastic cover could be rolled back easily, or removed completely.

The tab can be pulled out of the way, or removed completely, and even stuck back if you want to put the item back for safe keeping. Nice.

The tab can be pulled out of the way, or removed completely, and even stuck back if you want to put the item back for safe keeping. Nice.

Someone at Apple knew the frustration with this, and designed a better way to do it. I was impressed by this.

Anyone who has experienced a high end restaurant, custom tailored suit, or luxury car already knows there are fine details you get at the higher end. I, myself, don’t really care. They never seem to be worth the extra money for the extra “goodness” you get. But with Apple, the bits of polish seem to be everywhere – from the boxes the products come in, to the interesting ways they design their booklets or even cable straps.

I don’t know what impressed me about this silly little plastic tab and made me want to write this article, but … it did.

Drobo (2nd gen) to Drobo (3rd gen), part 5

See also: Part 1, Part 2, Part 3 and Part 4.

When we last left off, our hero (that’s me) was waiting to see if hs data survived after moving four hard drives from an old Drobo in to a new one. Spoiler: It did.

With that out of the way, let’s look at some of the differences between old versus new Drobos:

  1. The removable front plate has a logo that is now embossed/raises from the black plastic.
  2. The LEDs are much brighter.
  3. There is a power switch on the back.
  4. Drobo Dashboard gives you several new options!

Paradise By the Dashboard Light

Drobo Dashboard has a few notable improvements when browsing a 3rd generation Drobo:

Screenshot 2015-11-12 22.49.12

Drobo 3rd Gen: New System Information status display, featuring Drobo health.

Drobo 3rd Gen: New HEALTH status for each installed drive, too!

Drobo 3rd Gen: New Drive Information status display, featuring health of each installed drive, too!

Drobo 3rd Gen: New Performance status, though mine always shows 0.

Drobo 3rd Gen: New Performance status, though mine always shows 0.

And for comparison, the more limited Status display from the 2nd generation Drobo:

Drobo 2nd Gen: Much less status...

Drobo 2nd Gen: Much less status…

Under Volumes, there is now an option to create a special Time Machine volume. My understanding is that this volume will be treated as a size-limited volume, rather than the “grow until it breaks” virtual volumes.

Drobo 3rd Gen: New Time Machine volume support.

Drobo 3rd Gen: New Time Machine volume support.

The Tools display seems to be the same, except wording is different. “Turn Blink Lights On” versus “Blink Lights”, and “Shutdown” versus “Standby”.

Drobo 3rd Gen: Tools display.

Drobo 3rd Gen: Tools display.

The 3rd gen model adds a new Drobo Settings display. From here, you can set the name of the Drobo (that was possible with the 2nd gen, but was done somewhere else), Disk Drive Spindown, and Dim Lights timeout. There is also a greyed out “Dual Disk Redundancy” selection. According to a feature chart at the Drobo site, this model does support dual disk redundancy where  you can have two drives fail and still preserve data. I am unable to test that with my current unit since it was already formatted to use all the disks for storage in the previous 2nd gen model I had.

Drobo 3rd Gen: Drobo Settings display.

Drobo 3rd Gen: Drobo Settings display.

Dual Disk Redundancy is a feature I would really like to try out. You have less space available for data, but if you migrate from 2TB drives to 3TB drives, you can do this and end up with about the same amount of storage as before. This will be a topic for another time.

Next time, we’ll compare some data transfer benchmarks. How does a “faster” Drobo 3rd gen via a USB 2.0 port compare to a slower Drobo 2nd gen hooked up via FireWire? I could tell you now, but then you wouldn’t need to wait for the next part.

Until then…