Our NAS Died - It's A Sad Day and a Lesson Learned

I have a music collection that I’ve been curating for quite a while and use it with a Plex server to provide tunes to the whole house. The Plex server runs on my “Trashcan” Mac Pro and the folders are network shares from our aging Drobo NAS. I’ve been putting off purchasing a new NAS as this was working fine for the longest time… that was where I failed.

Just the other day, I noticed the NAS disks were offline but yet the Drobo reported the status as okay with no disk failures, degredation, or raid disk rebuilds.

┌─ drobo_seems_okay.jpeg ─ ──────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────── ─┐

└─ Drobo Looks Okay, Right? ─ ──────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────── ─┘

All of a sudden, the Drobo management software wouldn’t find or connect to the NAS. My stomach dropped - I knew what this meant. I brought the Drobo inside and tried a direct USB connection. Nada. Zilch. Uh oh. Not only did the Drobo store the music collection, it also held my Apple TimeMachine backups.

After much wrangling, I was left with a non-functional NAS and a sour taste in my mouth. It was all gone. All of it. With no warning.

┌─ drobo_failed.jpeg ─ ──────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────── ─┐

└─ It's Borked. No Connectivity. ─ ──────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────── ─┘

And there went my collection. I was holding off on replacing it because it was working well with narry the hint of what was brewing.

Don’t be like me. Get a new nas, load it with disks, and maybe purchase a second backup disk just in case. :(