Drobo 5D · 5C · 5D3 · Gen 2 and 3 · Mini · 8D
Drobo external hard drive recovery. The company has gone; the disks are still yours.
A Drobo is recovered here from £500 + VAT for two to four drives, and from £1,250 + VAT for larger sets. Drobo's support ended on 27 January 2023 and its parent company StorCentric went into Chapter 7 liquidation in April 2023, so there is nobody to ask and no firmware coming. Drobo used its own layout, BeyondRAID, which no other box reads, so the disks cannot simply be read one at a time; the layout is reconstructed from images of every disk. A dead Drobo is a set of drives that only that reconstruction can read. Five to ten days at the bench.
Rather talk it through? An engineer answers the bench line
0800 6890668
Models we see, family by family.
Which kind of drive is it →| Family | Models | Drive inside, and how it connects |
|---|---|---|
| Gen 2, Gen 3, Mini | Four and five bays | BeyondRAID, USB and FireWire or Thunderbolt |
| 5C, 5D, 5D3, 5Dt | Five bays | BeyondRAID, USB-C and Thunderbolt |
| 8D | Eight bays | BeyondRAID, Thunderbolt 3 |
What tends to go wrong on a Drobo.
Drobo symptoms, and how long each gives you.
Not listed? Describe it on the form →What the message means on a Drobo.
Describe yours to us →| What you see | The usual reason | Where that leaves you |
|---|---|---|
| One bay light red or amber | A failing member | Image it; no rebuild |
| Volume missing, drives shown as new | The controller has lost its configuration | Do not initialise; set rebuilt from the images |
| One drive clicking, volume gone | A striped set with a failed member | Member imaged on the bench; stripe rebuilt |
| Everything dead | Power supply or the controller board | Drives read directly |
From the box arriving to your files going back.
Work we have closed →Logged the day it lands, and the first look costs nothing Free
A case number goes on it the day the parcel is opened, and an engineer settles what has actually failed before anything else happens. A drive that clicks or beeps is not powered again; one that spins is read on our own imaging equipment, never in a computer that will retry and time out and retry. Back to you come two things together: a straight note of what is liftable and what is not, plus one figure, fixed and written down. Accept it, or decline and owe us nothing.
The enclosure and its board
Every external drive is two things: the drive, and the USB board that talks to it. The board is checked first, because a failed bridge, a snapped socket or a dead regulator is the whole fault on a good share of jobs, and because on WD's encrypted drives the board holds the key. Where the drive itself has stopped, it comes out of its case onto the bench.
The mechanics, in clean air
Stuck or failed heads are replaced with a matched set from a donor, seized spindles freed, and firmware faults corrected in the drive's service area from the terminal. The drive is not repaired to be used again; it is made to read once, in a single careful pass, and that pass is planned before it begins.
A full image, then the volume
Nothing is worked on live. The whole drive is imaged once, head by head and weak areas last, with reads timed to what the platters can stand, and the file system is put back together on the image. Encrypted volumes are unlocked there too, with the original board's key or the password you supply, and never on the original.
You see the file list before you pay
What was recovered is listed for you first, and only then does a bill exist. Approve the list and it is invoiced; turn it down and it is not — and where nothing has come back, most jobs carry no charge at all. Recovered data travels home on fresh media bought in for your job, with the postage at our end. Your case is not closed until you have opened the files on a machine of your own.
From the bench
- Label the bays before a drive comes out. A striped set put back in the wrong order will not assemble.
- A rebuild is the most dangerous button on the box. On a degraded set it writes across every remaining member. Stop it and image first.
- Send the box with the drives. The controller's configuration lives on its board, and on some units so does an encryption key.
What helps, and what harms.
Do this much first
- Power it down and leave it down
- Write each bay number on its drive if you remove any
- Send the box, its power supply and the drives
- Tell us the RAID mode if you know it
What sets us back
- Rebuilding, resyncing or re-creating the array
- Swapping drives between bays
- Initialising a drive that shows as new
- Running a repair from the unit's own software
Questions answered before you commit.
Can I put my disks in another Drobo?
Sometimes it works and sometimes it starts a rebuild that finishes what the first failure began. Do not; send the disks in labelled order.
Which drive is inside a Drobo?
It varies by model and batch: Seagate, Western Digital or Toshiba on anything recent, sometimes Samsung or Hitachi on older units. The free look identifies it, and donor parts are matched to the drive, not the badge.
What does it cost?
£300 + VAT for one drive after the free look, fixed in writing before any chargeable work. On most jobs no data means no bill.
How long does it take?
3–4 days at the bench after the free look.
Begin here if yours is doing the same thing.
Nothing gets worse while it is unplugged.
Looking at it is free. Back comes a list of what opened and what did not, together with a single price to finish, set down in writing while you are still free to say no. On most jobs an invoice only follows the data. Until that list reaches you, leave the drive unplugged.