Last week I built a hackintosh, and it took a few days of troubleshooting to get the USB ports working properly so I could access all my data, which is stored on a Drobo 5D. I had to wait several days before I could fully access my data, and now it seems I have to wait yet again.

I am not sure what event I have to thank for the current edition of 'data protection', but I am hoping it finishes faster than the 290 hours it initially reported!" class="mt-image-none" height="736

Just before I got the computer and USB ports working, I accidentally popped out two of the hard drives in the Drobo (possibly not simultaneously), which triggered the data protection process. Had the unit been powered down, I’m sure it wouldn’t have mattered, but since it was powered on and started the repair process, I may as well have inserted two blank hard drives.

I have about 8.5 TB of data on the unit with 10.85 TB total capacity (in dual drive redundancy mode), so that repair process took about three full days. While “data protection” is running, the Drobo Dashboard shows this messages:

Data protection is in progress. You may continue accessing your data, but please do not remove any hard drives with blinking yellow/green lights.

It doesn’t mention performance might be abysmal, but I guess the event should be rare enough users can’t complain, especially considering the device is saving them from losing data.

Anyway, I was anxious to get to work using Adobe Lightroom and organizing and editing my photos from the past few months, but it was taking too long to load thumbnails while the Drobo was shuffling data. So I waited.

Today it finally finished, but before getting to work, I decided to install the ASUS ThunderboltEX II that just arrived today and switch the Drobo from USB 3.0 to Thunderbolt. Theoretically I would increase the throughput potential from 5 Gb/s to 10 Gb/s (Thunderbolt actually can do 20 Gb/s, but my ASUS Z97-A/USB 3.1 motherboard supports only 10), so it seemed worth making the switch before getting to work.

Well, it took a little longer than it should have because I didn’t realize I needed to connect the Thunderbolt card’s header pins to the Thunderbolt header on my motherboard. I should have read the instructions, but assumed it was just for hooking up extra Thunderbolt ports or something. I also needed to do some jiggling with the UEFI settings before getting the card recognized by the operating system. (Possibly it was necessary to first install the drivers in Windows, strangely.)

Once I got the Thunderbolt port working, I plugged in the Drobo and rebooted (hot swap is not supported on the hackintosh setup). And, to my horror, the Drobo Dashboard reported both it was doing data protection, and also that there was only 5 TB of data, about half what there should be.

Scared the hackintosh OS X somehow started deleting my data, I immediately turned off the computer and rebooted the Drobo so I could look at its LED indication of how full it was. After booting, it showed it was definitely more than half full, so that was a bit of a relief, but it was still flashing, telling me data protection was still happening.

I did a brief search to see if others have encountered the data protection occurring after switching interfaces, but I didn’t find anything. I don’t think I knocked out any drives, but maybe something weird happened while I was plugging in the cable. All I found on the Drobo support site was the question, “My Drobo suddenly reports it’s in data protection mode, why?“:

A number of factors can cause your Drobo storage device to go into data protection mode:

• As time goes by, some drives may develop bad blocks. The Drobo device responds by going into relayout/rebuild to redistribute the data around these bad blocks.
• When a drive goes bad, the data must be redistributed among the remaining drives.
• When you add or remove a drive, your Drobo storage device must begin a process of safely redistributing data across all available drives.

No mention of “when you switch from USB to Thunderbolt”.

I waited a while and turned on the computer, after which it still showed less data than expected, but more than before. Very strange. I browsed the volume and didn’t notice anything missing, and OS X itself reports the volume has 8.45 TB used, so I am just going to hope everything is OK and see how it looks after data protection finishes. In possibly several days. The initial hours reading was almost 300, but now it says less than 100. We’ll see I guess.

In the mean time, I’ll try to start doing some work despite not having a speedy Drobo. And I’ll cross my fingers nothing else goes wrong!

OS X reports I have used 8.45 TB, which seems correct. The Drobo Dashboard reports I've used 7.65 TB, which is more than the 5 TB it reported before rebooting, but still not correct." class="mt-image-none" height="693

OS X reports I have used 8.45 TB, which seems correct. The Drobo Dashboard reports I've used 7.65 TB, which is more than the 5 TB it reported before rebooting, but still not correct." class="mt-image-none" height="736