Drobo Rebooting Again...

So, my Drobo 5D, which I had troubles with this summer, surprised me last week by going into data protection mode and showing the third bay as empty, even though it wasn't.

I updated the firmware (automatic updates were off, for some reason) and Drobo Dashboard, rebooted the Drobo and the Mac Mini, and the third bay showed up again, and everything went back to normal.

A week or two later, the drive bay went 'red' (e.g. failed), and the Drobo started going into a reboot cycle that it wouldn't break. I'm working with Drobo technical support now to see what's going on and what I should do about it. In the meantime, I can't access the data on my Drobo again.

I know that hard drives fail, but so far my experience has been that instead of helping to protect me from hard drive failure, Drobo is magnifying that, so that I'm totally reliant on both all disks and the Drobo hardware to work 100% correctly, where any failure takes the whole unit down. That's not what I want. I'm sure it's not what Drobo wants either, and my experience may be atypical, but it sure is frustrating.

I've got most of the data up on Backblaze now, but the initial backup wasn't complete. Assuming the Drobo survives this incident, I am really feeling like it's not optional any longer to rely heavily on the Drobo, and I'm going to need to add a NAS to my home network to act as a backup for the Drobo.

That's going to be non-trivial in terms of expense, but the alternative is too fraught with tense moments where I wonder what's going to happen to my data.

I'll try to post another update when this is all resolved.