The second week of the year back at work started out a little better than the first. To start with I had a train ticket so didn”t need to go through the Monday morning hell of queuing up, and the trains were also running fairly smoothly with delays of only a few minutes here and there. All went well until it snowed again on Tuesday night and I couldn”t get the car out on Wednesday morning. This was a major pain in the butt as I had ordered something online, which I”ll come on to, that was due to be delivered on the Wednesday that I needed urgently but also because I hadn”t been shopping. Luckily I have access to all the work systems from home so could get on and after a several attempts on Wednesday afternoon I managed to get the car freed up. Thursday I was able to slip and slide my way to the train station and make it into the office. Thursday and Friday were busy but uneventful thankfully and I managed to successfully retrieve my package. Friday night it rained and for the first time since Christmas I was able to see my drive way. Saturday I was able to escape and get some shopping done before meeting up with some friends for a couple of beers (read hungover this morning).

So today is a house day! The chores done I can get on with catching up with the paperwork, first task my 2009 Tax Filing, oh the joy. That done and with the next major task being the ironing, which is Sunday evening in front of the TV job, I decided to get on with sorting out a couple of issues that had popped up during the week.

Now when working at home I often fire up iTunes as I find working in complete silence a little weird. Now since buying a Drobo and DroboShare I have been playing around with using it for both file storage and as a backup device. Now to cut a long story short I had copied my iTunes library over to it and all seemed to be going well. Well, Tuesday evening while catching up with email on opening iTunes I was told met with a default iTunes library screen. After a little messing around I found that iTunes kept telling me the Library file was damaged and it had created a new one. It wasn”t until I looked at the Drobo I found one of the drives was showing as failed. Now I didn’t have any spare ones so as quick as a flash I ordered two spares. Now what puzzled me was that the Drobo is supposed to handle a failed drive without any data issues. Mmmm interesting.

As I couldn’t get into the office on Wednesday and had selected the office as the delivery location for the drives I had to wait until Thursday to pick them up and until Thursday night to replace the failed drive. Imagine what I said when I plugged in a new drive and it went through the motions only to also show up as failed. So I dropped a line to Drobo Support. They came back to me on Friday suggesting I follow the following article, which I did as well as some other basic trouble shooting tips.

These tips basically involved testing to see if the fault followed the disk or if the slot was the issue, so they had me remove the failed drive and swap the other drives around to see if the fault followed the drive. Now this was interesting in as much as SLOT 1 was showing the failed drive but if I move the drive from SLOT 2 to SLOT 1 all three drives showed as good. However if I either inserted the failed drive from SLOT 1 or a new drive into SLOT two, the drive in SLOT 1 (which was the one I had moved from SLOT 2) showed as failed.

I tried moving drives around and inserting new drives in the vacant SLOT but what every I tried the drive in SLOT 1 showed as failed when all four bays were populated. So I emailed Drobo Support with the results Friday evening. Now it would appear that Drobo don’t do weekend support as I haven’t had anything more from them, but I needed to play a little more. So today I (having a full backup of all the data) reset the Drobo with the original four drives and recreated the volumes and formatted all the drives. Thus far all four are showing online and good so I am none the wiser as to what the issue is / was, but am loathed to trust it at this point. I will be testing it out a little more but look forward to Drobo”s next response, especially as I was on the verge of ordering another one to use with my Mac Mini Media centre.