I bought my first Drobo back in 2011. Over the past 7 years it has served me well. It has reminded me on several occasions the importance of keeping backups. Not just backups, but redundant backups.

The Drobo takes four drives and uses them in a RAID array. I've had several drives die on me over the years. If the drive that died was my only drive, I'd lose everything! Drives don't last forever. I've even had one or two fail in the warranty period. You can't use the same drive for 5 years and be surprised when it up and dies. That's what's awesome about a Drobo. You can fill it with a bunch of drives and your data is protected in a RAID array. If one drive dies, you're OK. You can swap the dead drive out with a good one. The Drobo then recovers the parity data from the other drives and rewrites it to the new one to put you back in business.



After 7 years, it's growing a little long in the tooth and I knew it was only a matter of time before I had to replace it. Just a few months ago the bearings on the fan wore out. It sounded horrible. I had to replace the fan.

A few weeks ago I came home to this nightmare. Data protection in progress.



After it figured itself out, I was left with this. No way! Dead drive! I didn't believe it. It's a 2TB server-class hard drive and it hasn't even been 3 years.



I pulled the drive out and popped it back in. Drobo did its thing and then gave me all green lights.



I ran Disk First Aid on it just to make sure everything was OK, but macOS complained that it could not repair the drive. Despite Drobo Dashboard saying all systems were go, macOS gave it the thumbs down. I couldn't trust it anymore with my data. Another problem that kept happening was that my Mac would periodically eject the drive for no reason. I'd power cycle the Drobo and it would reappear on the desktop. Some time later, it would eject it again. I searched online for a solution and tried all the tricks I could find, but no luck. Nothing I did seemed to work. I contacted Drobo for help in figuring out if the Drobo was on the way out, or was there a bug introduced with macOS 10.13. It seemed like a lot of people online were having problems with external drives auto-ejecting. Drobo refused to help since the drive was considered obsolete. They told me to just buy a new one. Thanks.

I was hesitant on buying a new Drobo if there was a macOS bug that wouldn't allow me to use it. I wasn't about to drop $400 bucks on a Drobo I couldn't use. I remember back in the day when I couldn't print for months because Apple broke printing with an OS update. I had to wait months for them to fix it. I can't go months without doing a backup.

About a month had gone by and it seemed like there was no real solution in site so I had to bite the bullet and pick up a cheap Western Digital 4TB drive to use for Time Machine. It's better than nothing.

I had a Drobo 5C on my Amazon wish list, but with no major holidays in site and my birthday six months away, I figured I'd just have to go Drobo-less for a little longer. It just so happens that I have the best wife ever. She spotted it on my wishlist and just for the hell of it, ordered it. Awesome.

I get home from work before her and usually receive the Amazon boxes. She called me while I was at work and told me when I get home that they'll be a box coming and not to open it. Suspicious. When she got home, she let me open it.

Awesome! I was so surprised.











Pretty cool that they give you this nice little bag for it, but I don't know what I'd use it for. It would have been cool if they wrapped it in a t-shirt. That I could use.



Wow, it's so much nicer looking than my old 2nd gen version.



Not much happening on the back. Just power and USB-C.



It's way bigger than my old one. That's mainy due to the fact that the old one took four drives and the new one takes five.



The first order of business is swapping my drives over.



Since I only have 4 x 2TB drives, I threw in a spare 640GB drive that I had laying around. I plugged it in, downloaded the software, and let it do its thing.



Told you there was nothing wrong with that 2TB drive. No complaints here.



After I reformatted the drives, all was good. There was no sense in keeping the backup that was on there since it's so out of date. I just started Time Machine with a fresh backup. I'll keep the Western Digital as an additional backup drive for my Lightroom library.



Yeah! Here's to another 7 years, and hopefully more!