Possible Dead drobo
Possible Dead drobo
My dad has a NAS Drobo 5N. In october when he got home from a road trip he saw two drives dead, or at least two drives showing the yellow led. (this is "fine", its running in duel redundant raid 6) at some point last week new drives were put in to rebuild the array, but it never did. now after a power outage, the drobo is showing all drives as inaccessible. This is a 12-year-old drobo, from my minimal research this seems like a symptom of a dead PSU. I have been getting on him about building a new system altogether, but thats besides the point now. Priority one is recovering the 10s of terabytes of data on it. Would a new (used) functioning Drobo 5n be able to read the data Also some references to solid middle-tier affordable nas builds would be nice. Like its crazy to me that a diskless 8 bay NAS from synology costs 1000. Edit: im told the lights are now all red....
It's uncertain without more details about the PSU failure and the condition of the array beforehand. If the system starts up but shows missing drives, I don't think a PSU problem is likely. You're investing in software, a tailored motherboard, and case—pricing those together makes sense, especially if you need reliable support without keeping expensive staff on duty all the time.
My dad and I are both highly tech-savvy. This project isn’t about making money—it’s about digitizing our family history from 70 years ago and backing up all the household computers. We’re adding extra storage for the kids, even though updates are infrequent. Right now we’re using two Drobo 5Ns, each with different data types. Both are in RAID6, which isn’t ideal against bit rot, so I think it’s time to upgrade. (That was a smart idea 12 years ago.) We’re aiming for a system that supports up to 12 drives, allowing smooth transfers and easy future expansion. Drobo makes this possible because the drives don’t need to be identical in size—swapping one can actually increase storage capacity. No cloud backup, though we’d like one. I’m also curious about how Xfinity will react to sending over 10 TBs of data for a single upload.