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Comment by lobster45 | Hacker News Reader

I have an 8 bay Drobo Pro with eight 2 TB drives, and I have a drive go out every few months. Of course this is because we went cheap with WD Green drives. However the Drobo Pro offers to use two drives "as protection" so you can have two drives go out and it keeps going.

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You could be having the TLER problem. WD green drives can take a long time to do error correction - this causes the raid to drop the drive as failed. This solution is to respond with an error quickly and let the raid fix it with parity.... but at least it doesn't drop the drive. Or buy more expensive drives. Wait isnt that the idea behind RAID: Redundant Array of Inexpensive Disks..

You might want to look at this... http://hardforum.com/showthread.php?t=1285254

btw, I am currently working on recovering an 8 bay drobopro thats in a reboot loop...

TLER really isn't a problem with software raid which the drobo and all other home NAS's that I know of use.

It may very well be the issue, if a disk takes a long time to recover from errors even a software RAID will throw the disk out or risk being the problem by itself. TLER will limit the damage.

Ofcourse, if the software was smart enough to know how to handle this properly and recover automatically it need not drop the disk completely from the array.

The reboot loop may be a bad unit. I just had a first edition 8 bay replaced free even though it was way out of warranty. Call them and ask nicely.

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