I love my Drobo. I know it’s the yuppie version of a home raid array, but it’s quiet enough to keep in my living room and it looks like something out of Tron.
Mine is a 2nd generation 4 bay Drobo that I’ve been using for a couple years. It’s worked well enough that my partner and I managed to fill it up! No problem, I thought, I’ll just swing by Fry’s Electronics and pick up a new shiny 3TB disk, right? Wrong.
I pulled out a lowly 1TB disk, popped in the new 3TB one and saw a red blinky light :( According to the docs, this indicates that my disk was dead on arrival. I refused to believe this. I thought, “This is a big drive, maybe I need to update the firmware?” It turned out to be a bit more complicated than this.
If your Drobo is blinking red on your brand new drive, follow these steps to fix it:
- Look at your Drobo Dashboard software. Does it look like something written in FoxPro or Tron? If it looks like Tron skip ahead to step 5.
- Upgrading Drobo Dashboard: Since you have the older, grayer Drobo Dashboard, there’s something you should know: it’s lying to you. It probably says your Drobo’s firmware is up to date. It’s wrong. To upgrade the firmware you must first upgrade the dashboard.
- Navigate to Drobo’s downloads page. Download the appropriate software. In my case this was the software under ‘Drobo Gen 2’ way down near the bottom of the page.
- Install the new dashboard. The specific instructions will depend on your platform. It should be easy so I won’t go through the specifics here. After the installation you may need to reboot.
- Upgrading your Drobo’s Firmware: Since you’re now using the new shiny Drobo Dashboard reminiscent of Tron, you can upgrade the firmware :D Simply fire up the Drobo Dashboard click on All Devices -> Status and follow the dialogs to upgrade to the latest firmware.
After your Drobo reboots it will accept your new hard disk. In as little as a day the blinking LEDs will go solid green and you will be able to enjoy your increased storage capacity. Grats!
