Drobo failures, Tivo failures

Published by

rich

23 July 2011

Yikes, what a host of failures over the last month, 2 of my 3 Tivos have failed (both look like temperature related hard dirves). And the Drobo iSATA controller has failed. Here are the diagnostic procedures:

Drobo. Main lesson here is that even on a power conditioner, you need more and leave it off enough. With a DroboPro, it costs $500 for three years of support as my current two years are ending this November. Right now I think I’ll RMA the Drobo and look for more reliable solutions. Maybe a simpler RAID box where if the box fails, I don’t have to spend $1000 to replace it. And with the new Mac Mini it is fast enough and silent enough that maybe this is a good dedicated server with a Thunderbolt Raid box.
Tivo. There is apparently a way to diagnose the hard disk. One seems to be temperature related, but the disk looks like it is smaller. The other just seems just hang on boot so needs a hard reset. I can’t seem to get this done. So the main fix seems to be to replace the hard drive. Sigh. Seems like someone must make a solid state based recorder that works with Comcast. Help!

TiVo HD
TiVo HD XL

1. As the DVR restarts, the green LED light on the front bezel DVR will be lit.

2. As soon as it blinks, immediately (within 2 seconds) press and hold down the PAUSE button on the remote.

3. Within a few moments, the yellow and red LED lights will turn on.(If you are unable to catch the timing, you may also hold the PAUSE button down continuously during the restart until the yellow and red LEDs come on.)

4. When the yellow and red LEDs come on, release the PAUSE button and then press 54 on the remote control. (You will have approximately 10 seconds to do this.)

2 responses to “Drobo failures, Tivo failures”

poller

27 July 2011

Your best bet is to dump Drobo in favor of iomega/emc or netgear. I have 4 iomega ix4 units in my house, and another 4 in another location. No failures in more than a year. They share via CIFS, NFS, and iSCSI. I boot multiple VMware servers off the iSCSI, and then mount NFS and CIFS.
The ix4 uses an external laptop power supply. If it fails, just pull and replace.

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1. rich
  
  30 July 2011
  
  Wow that is a great solution. Thanks. The things that seem to fail are the power supplies and the drives and then there are power spikes, so it is very good to have an external supply, RAID drives and then a UPS as well. I have the Drobo because I have sunk cost and it is slowly coming back up, but getting the Iomega/emc seems smart.
  
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