Mini not recognizing Seagate External

[durwood101]

i have 4 externals that are all identical...one of them last night refuses to mount. At first i suspected the worst, but after poking around, the disc itself appears to be fine. I ran disk utility and got a green light...so what is the problem? Ran Repair Disk, volume repair complete...still no mount...any suggestions? These are Seagate Go Flex Desk externals and i was reading that sometimes a board inside the seagate can go faulty and exhibits this behavior.....is that what i am likely dealing with?

[mooblie]

Are you willing/able to open up the external cases, and swap the drives inside around between cases? That way you will be able to identify a faulty drive, or more likely - a faulty interface board in the external case.
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Martin at HeadSpin HD now on Blu-ray

[durwood101]

absolutely.

[durwood101]

okay, i opened the drive, that board was easy to get to. is this the board that is the culprit??

[durwood101]

nope, that sata board that was easy to remove and switch out was not the culprit.....

[durwood101]

any other suggestions?

[mooblie]

You said "the disk appears to be fine" and now "the SATA board was not the culprit" - so that only leaves only... what... the cable?

...but you must have eliminated that too!

Sounds like everything you've tested (by swapping stuff around) works, except in one particular combination?
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Martin at HeadSpin HD now on Blu-ray

[durwood101]

I think I've covered every base that I am aware of. I moved the drive to every dock connector that is plugged in to the Mini, all the others are operational. I took that Sata board out and replaced it with a known good one....still no dice. When I ran disk utility, I got a green light that drive was operational, no problems. After doing some poking online, it seems that these Seagate Externals are unfavorably poor at working with MACS, something with the filesystem....errors.....something or another. The Seagate forums have many people just like me who posted a very similar issue with their Seagate just all of a sudden not mounting.....very strange. The hard drive lights come on, the disc spins........no grinding or unpleasant noises eminate from the drive......I'm sure the drive itself is fine.....there is just something I am missing here.

[durwood101]

Since this is my first rough lesson in backing up........which we all learned since the days of elementary school about saving your work every 5 minutes with DOS floppys..............lol...I went ahead and bought a Drobo, I figure losing one drive was enough to make me learn my lesson this time.

[Cypher]

Word of warning durwood Don't just rely on the Drobo, remember to also back up elsewhere.

Drobo's are great when they work but they are very costly data wise when they don't. I have had my Drobo just under a year and 5 separate drives have developed issues over that year whilst being in the Drobo. If one fails your fine the drobo will continue and you can swap out the faulty one for a new drive, but recently I had second one fail whilst it was recovering from another drive failure and I ended up loosing something like 3TB of files. The recovery from a drive failure isn't a quick process mine took something like 30+ hours of constant disk access as it relays the data. During this process a second drive failed. Luckily most was backed up to secondary storage, if it hadn't been I would have lost the lot. Also unlike a normal external drive you can't just whip out the drive and stick it in another enclosure to get to your data, as it's in an array you need all the drive present to be able to get to the data.

Drobo support was terrible, very very slow, with dim witted replies at times requesting information I had already given them, pretty annoying when you've waited five days for the reply in the first place. I have to say they were not much help at all and probably more of a hinderance.

After a month of spending time waiting on Drobo support, and seemingly just digging the hole I was in deeper and deeper, As I needed the data store back, in the end I just admitted defeat and just reformatted the whole stack.

I was lucky most of what I had on the Drobo was backed up elsewhere, I was desperate to recover the data on the drives more as a case of checking everything was backed up and that I wasn't about to loose something important you never can be sure what you saved on there and if it was back up. I did loose some stuff as it turned out my backups were 100% thankfully it wasn't the very important stuff.

Its hard to back up a big array in one go, so you need a good system. Don't rely on the Drobo's own redundancy system to save you arse, it did work for me a couple of times when I drive failed and so I grew to trust it but ultimately that single point of failure bit me back and made it a lot worse as I lost 5 disks worth of data when it did go wrong.
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Phil

Mac Mini 2.53GHz - iMac 2.0Ghz - Macbook Pro 2.4GHz - iPad 1 32GB 3G
6TB Netgear Ready NAS NV+ - 6TB Drobo S

[durwood101]

Thanks for the heads up. Yes, I have been reading up on all the Drobo horror stories.........there are indeed a lot out there. It would be interesting to know why some are completely error free, and others like yourself have paid a dear price for the lack of support and performance from the Drobo. May I ask what kind of drives you were using? I guess ultimately it doesn't matter, as all drives will eventually fail, but from reading online, it seemed that Seagates were especially bad for installing in a Drobo.........

[Cypher]

I've had a mix of drives in there, but the ones that have failed have been Seagate's and Samsung's.

I had a Samsung fail very early on which was one of two identical drives I installed when I bought the drobo, one refused to work in the drobo but the other is still ok.

At the moment I have 2x1TB Samsung's, a 1.5TB Seagate and a 2TB Western Digital installed. The Western Digital I recently added when the two seagate's failed. The Seagate's that failed were a 1.5TB and a 1TB.

After completing the reformat of the drives, and restoring some files, Drobo support asked me to send them a diagnostic file. The results of that show that the remaining Seagate and one of the Samsung's are showing signs that they could be heading the same way. They say it's just a few bad sectors and not critical but I'm going to replace them anyway.

I also read the same info as you about Seagate drives in Drobo's failing which was partly why I bought the Western Digital when the other two failed. When I can afford it, I plan to buy another WD and start to swap out the older drives Fingers crossed that it works better with Western Digitals.

One thing that worries me is the Drobo Diagnostics log file is an encrypted file which only drobo support can read. Why are they hiding the results from us. It might suggest they don't want people seeing how dodgy their data might actually be

My thoughts are now that additional Backups are essential with Drobo's
_________________
Phil

Mac Mini 2.53GHz - iMac 2.0Ghz - Macbook Pro 2.4GHz - iPad 1 32GB 3G
6TB Netgear Ready NAS NV+ - 6TB Drobo S