Drobo Suddenly Extremely Slow

I've been using my Drobo for years now (I have the old USB version, I think it was V2 of the product) and it's been great but recently it's become slow. I mean unrealistically slow. A 750mb file took overnight to transfer from my desktop PC's internal drive to my Drobo. This also isn't due to running low on space because I still have around 1TB free and the status lights are not red yet so I know it isn't just the Drobo in reduced speed mode until I expand the storage. The really weird part is I can copy files FROM the Drobo to other hard drives or thumb drives at normal speeds, just cannot write TO the Drobo.

Anyone had any issues like this before or have an idea what might be causing this? I tried over at the official Drobo forums too, but I trust people's opinions here more so figured I'd give it a shot

Possibly a bad drive that just hasn't been detected by the unit yet? How much total space do you have? I know the DroboPro we had at work (and I now have at home) would slow to a crawl when it hit about 75-80% capacity.. still plenty of room since we had it loaded with 2 TB drives.

Those things can be a little finicky to say the least. My DroboPro decided to stop booting (would go about half way through the boot process and restart) for no reason last week. Had to pull all the drives, do a factory reset, put the drives back, and connect it via USB to reconfigure iscsi. Luckily it is used for backups only, and it has been running fine since.

Hrmm could be a bad drive, I recently had a drive in there die and replaced it with a new one and thought everything was fine but might not have detected the new drive yet. It's loaded with 4x3TB drives with a total capacity of 8.15TB taking into account the space allocated for data protection. 88% is used currently, but the blue lights are still not all lit up and previously the Drobo wouldn't slow down until all the blue lights across the bottom were lit and the warning indicator turned from orange to red. And even in the past when it slowed down due to being almost full it was never THIS slow, and it would be slow for both reading and writing from the Drobo not just writing.

My main dilemma is the data on here is not backed up (can't really afford to back up this much right now) and the reason I got a Drobo was so I had some sense of protection from a drive failing without losing any data. I suppose I will try pulling the drives one at a time and see if that fixes things.

So after pulling out two drives and letting it rebuild the data it seems to be working fine now. Thanks for the help!

Hey Deception, I am having the same issue.

What did you mean you pulled one hard drive at a time until the issue was fixed?

Since you had 3 drives, Did you do something like move the hard drive in bay 1 into Bay 4...then let the Drobo rebuild the data....Then move the one in Bay 2 into Bay 1 ... and so on?

I have the exact same issue, and my Drobo is crawling to a stop, I can't get transfer rates about 1 MB/sec and it will usually fail after trying to transfer at this speed for longer than a few minutes. This all seemed to happen after I upgrade my Drobo, by swapping a 2 TB drive with a 4 TB drive. I have so much data on my Drobo that I don't know what to do.

Thanks

Themevictory said:

Hello, my friend Decepticon,
Could you please elaborate in details what steps did you take when replacing drives in the step by step details, please???
Thanks
BTW!!! Great job on fixing this problem.
Best regards,
Themevictory

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Holy necro, batman.