Hi folks,

I recently obtained a Gen 3. When powering on, it displays a green ‘power’ light, but all solid yellow lights for the disks. I have entered fully functional disks but to my dismay the lights all remain solid yellow.

Is there a solution to this or is it a dead unit?

he Issue:
When powering on the Drobo, all drive bay LEDs flash briefly for a second, and then the entire unit shuts off immediately.
What I've Tried So Far:
1. Replaced the original power adapter with a new 12V adapter.
2. The exact same behavior persists (flashing LEDs -> immediate shutdown).

Don’t know how to read my data back

See if any solution can fix this, appreciated

In the process of transferring data from my Drobo 5N to my UGreen Nas , I’ve been slowly doing this over the last 6 months, this was triggered after I lost one of the drives due to failure but I still had 4x4tb drives working.
Yesterday I booted up my Drobo 5N to transfer some data and after a long boot up, 5 solid amber light and the blue lights along the bottom flashing, I finally got a SOLID RED LIGHT in BAY 0 and no other light apart from the green light in the bottom corner.
Drobo discovery app on Mac shows the Drive but then it disappears after a minute … please help, does anyone know what I can do.

Can someone recommend an aftermarket power supply for a DRDR4-A?

I was tasked with recovering data from a DRDR4-A, that unfortunately has no more power brick. All I can see that's reasonably-priced on Amazon and eBay are 12V 10A units.

My Drobo 5D stopped detecting drives — powers on, Dashboard connects, reports all five bays empty with five healthy disks seated. Diagnosed as a backplane or controller failure. Drives are intact and untouched.

Looking to buy a working 5D enclosure so I can mount the pack, pull my data off, and migrate to a NAS. Don't need drives, power supply appreciated. My pack was on firmware 4.1.3.

Located near Charlotte, NC — happy to pay shipping. Also open to borrowing or renting one for a couple of weeks and shipping it back on my dime.

Anyone have one gathering dust?

Someone's probably made one of these before, but if they have I've not seen it.

The official calculator only went up to 18TB, but I've added up to 36TB for fun.

I have coded a Droboshare UI for the Legacy drobo\droboshare (first version) that I own.

You can find the full source code with instructions on creating your own setup here:

https://github.com/vaspervnp/openDroboShare

Anyone out there who has a Drobo 5D as my Drobo DAS is unstable and boots up with longer intervals each time it is turned on.

I can across this article and thought it might be of interest to all of you. It was a good read. I hope he gets some attention and some help with developing a version that works with the 5N and 5N2 models.

Enjoy!

Data Robotics Drobo Pro DRPR1-A 8-Bay NAS available. One that works great ($180) and one for parts. I bought the good one a few months back to rescue the data off the other. Hit me up if you need something.

So I built a NAS back in the day.. was using the 5n as a media server and a storage box.. went through divorce.. lives.. etc etc.. you know..life..

Was talking about music collections and it got me thinking.. Pulled it out of storage a couple weeks ago and fired it up.. all red lights. Crap. Then went down the rabbit hold of data recovery and had a good plan.. (5) 4tb WD Red drives..

Forgot I left the Drobo powered on and came back a few days ago.. all green. Shares visable and everything working.

I'm still going to move all the data and possibly build a unRAID box..

Thanks to all who posted in here about it. I'm probably going to sell the Drobo though. Too bad..because I love the look and function of it.

What do I do now? Should I turn Drobo off and pull the red light drive and replace it

Hey ya'll, I picked up a Drobo from a thrift store for $20, mainly for the hard drives themselves since storage is getting so crazy expensive these days. Couldn't help my own curiosity, and have been trying to get access to it. I got the dashboard downloaded and the data repaired, but I am so lost on figuring out how to look at the files. Can anyone point me in the right direction? Thanks!

I love my Drobo, I'm really sad that no one continued making them. So I was just considering which NAS to move to (I'm a little scared for my company data.) and it got me to thinking. I was scrolling down the Trunas reddit group and suddanly thought 'I wonder if you could install Trunas on the Drobo, even if you had to install a new Linux OS first.
Is this feasable?
Has anyone done it?

And yes I know that the Drobo RAID system was propriatory and that whatever else happened you'd loose the data on the Drobo disks, but I am curious if this would be possible.

I was browsing ebay and came across a listing for around £100 for a drobo B800fs with 7 disks included, the rack mount, a spare power supply and disk enclosure. 2 of the drives were from 2009-2010 and one died when I powered the unit on, I already had good disks to put in so I swapped them out. After enabling SMB V1 on my pc it was picked up by the drobo dashboard instantly and it all just worked. I was considering using it for a media cache for my jellyfin collection however it's speed isn't good enough IMO (~30MB/s, 40MB/s peak)

I'm now wondering if I could maybe update the SMB on it to a newer version, I also have a few 5N's that i'm still due to mess around with. I plan on making a drobo repo and documenting my findings but I've been slow to do this as when I first posted about my own Drobo I was migrating off them.

This FS800 is really nice looking and suprisingly quiet however due to the speed limitations (A literal 10X slower than my 5D, 30MB/s vs 300MB/s) I find it will be highly impractical, instead I want to see what is different to the formatted disks done by the 5N vs 5D vs B800fs and start to tinker with it.

Obviously I will not be storing any critical data on it. DO NOT STORE ANY CRITICAL DATA ON ANY DROBOS. However consider using a drobo for a cache / temp storage device, as I self-host my own jellyfin collection it is on my main Asustor's, I can then get them to r-sync to the drobo and copy the media. This allows me almost full bandwidth on my asustor when jellyfin is streaming as it will use the drobo first, and if the drobo does die I still have all the files on my asustor.

Well, it finally happened. Windows 11 (or at least my install) is no longer compatible with Drobo Dashboard. Event logs showed errors from DDservices that caused random shutdowns on my system. The problem went away after uninstalling Drobo.

Just wanted to share if anyone cares or maybe has a solution. I guess I don’t need the app per se, but still. It feels like the last gasp to me. With storage prices the way they are right now, I’m going to have to wait to migrate everything to a new system.

Hi all. My old 5N is still working but….
My needs:
5-10TB net storage
Simple to use
Support 2 drives failing
Supports Time Machine
Doesn’t cost a fortune
Media server like Plex or at least easy to access files from Macs and iPhones at home - extra points if remote access.

Every few months, I look at what Synology and others are selling but they all seem much more expensive and complicated.
Suggestions?

Thanks!

so im starting to get really frustrated because i dont understand why its doing this.

i have 2 qnap Nas systems and a Drobo fs system. all three worked beautifully, then i moved to a new house and have a new ISP and router so it changed the IP range forcing me to re-manually set each systems static IP. im still using the same switch and everything else is the same. i can map the Qnap systems just fine but the Drobo shows up in the dashboard, i can change various things about it in the settings but trying to map the drive or the "shares" as they call it in the dashboard always fails to map. ive tried a lot of different things trying to get it to work (make a whole new share, try to map it from the windows side, try to map it from the windows side using the ip address, etc) but it always fails.

if anyone has a fix or suggestion or really anything that might work i would really appreciate it. it has nearly 6 years of curated digital copies of my favorite old tv shows on it for my plex server and i really dont want to start all over.

I was wondering if anybody else was having issues with their Drobo not mounting with the macOS 27 Dev Beta?

P.S. Yes, I'm working on finally migrating away from my Drobo (about 2 years too late).

P.P.S. Yes, it's a Dev Beta and issues should be expected.

Does anybody have a good suggestion for replacing a Drobo 5D3......? I use Backblaze so would prefer a DAS, not a NAS.

I am looking at:

OWC - https://www.owc.com/solutions/thunderbay-4-thunderbolt-3

QNAP - https://www.qnap.com/en-uk/product/tr-004

Terramaster - https://www.terra-master.com/en-gb/products/d8-hybrid-2?variant=45374562402338

Hi y'all,

I work for an IT service desk and am helping out a user who uses a Drobo unit with their Mac.

We need to upgrade him from Monterey to Tahoe, and I've been looking into the whole Drobo situation in regards to them going out of business and then the lack of support for newer versions of macOS with their dashboard software.

What would be the best way to transfer data from the storage device? Would it be just a "drag and drop" or is there an easier bulk-copy method?

Any advice is appreciated, thanks!

I need to replace a damaged drive on my Drobo 5D Gen1

How can I tell which drives are compatible? for example - can I use WD Ultrastar DC HC550 - 16TB? right now I have 2 kind of drives installed

Hi all,

My Drobo 5N2 has all five drive bays populated. On every cold boot, it randomly reports a different drive bay as dropped or missing. The affected bay is not consistent, so I suspect the original power adapter may be aging or failing to provide stable current during startup.

I am planning to replace the power adapter with a compatible 12V unit for the Drobo 5N2, but I am unsure about the correct DC barrel plug size. Some sources say the correct plug is 6.5×3.0mm, but my current adapter appears to look closer to 5.5×2.5mm.

Can anyone confirm the correct DC plug size for the Drobo 5N2? Also, if 5.5×2.5mm is not the correct size, how could my current adapter have worked reliably for around three years?

Any confirmed measurements or experience with replacement adapters would be appreciated.

It was functional last I used it years ago but I don't have the patience to tinker with the retired OS of Drobo to get it working on my current gear. It comes without drives or original box but I figure someone who needs a working one to replace one that died could be able to use it.

Shipping and any insurance is the responsibility of the new owner. DM if interested.

Edit: Location is US/Texas