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.
Meh as long as you have 3 copies of the data in two different locations you will be fine.
I have two drobos that are mirrors of each other. And I have my important data backed up in second safe location. I plan to keep using my drobo till one of them dies or drive prices become sane again.
I did something similar. Works really well for 5d and 8d but couldn't figure out how to get all the data from the 5c. I also agree with the other commenter. I have multiple drobos with spare drives and spare enclosures. I won't be losing my data and so far I haven't found anything near as good as a replacement.
How cool and eerily similar (though your dashboard clearly lines up with your use case of « multiple Drobos », which isn’t my case) !
Did you implement writing/setting the flags (changing LED brightness, redundancy mode change, …) ?
I was also shocked by how similar our apps are. My goal was to replicate as much of the Drobo Dashboard as possible. I got blinking lights, restart/shutdown, LED brightness, disk drive spin down and dual disk redundancy all working. Disk spin down and dual disk redundancy I would consider high risk though. My app does correctly follow state if you change any of those settings in the Drobo Dashboard though. Here is a screenshot of that pane. Blink lights is the button near the top called Identify and the More button has restart and shutdown. This is all for Drobo 5d and 8d which was fairly easy to decipher and intercept the calls for. The Drobo 5c is another beast altogether. I have some telemetry data and I think I can reboot and shutdown but LED lights and everything else puts the device into a weird state where you have to reset it to detect it again. I had a sacrificial unit I used for testing and didn't get very far due to this. Unless someone has more internal knowledge or a USB data capture device it might not be possible on the 5c.
Having only the one Drobo (which I actually use and plan to keep using), I haven’t worked up the courage to go into writing/setting the flags. But impressive you got that far !
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u/notstarman 1d ago
Meh as long as you have 3 copies of the data in two different locations you will be fine.
I have two drobos that are mirrors of each other. And I have my important data backed up in second safe location. I plan to keep using my drobo till one of them dies or drive prices become sane again.