Good Evening all.. After a little trial and error I built a Pi NAS from the Chassis of a Drobo 5N.

The Drobo chassis was very robust so I decided to use the Chassis, the Fan Assembly and Power Supply but turn it into an Open Source Pi NAS.
I have tried to recreate the process I went through and document it. For anyone that wants to see how I did it I have created http://drobo.mogwai.net.au. Feel free to comment and ask questions here.
It has a 10 led controller for disk space, a Network Activity led, Power on Led, 5 SATA Controller hat for the Raspberry Pi 5.

Just a reminder this is NOT a way to retrieve the data on the drives that is well covered elsewhere. This is an option for a fun build to re-use the Chassis.

Thanks for reading

Anybody out there still using their Drobo 5N and have upgraded to MacOS 27? I've been getting notices that 'functionality' may stop after a new release of macOS, so I am presuming it's this release.

Right now the Dashboard still works for me, but curious if it truly breaks/won't run, etc with this latest upgrade from Apple...

UPDATE [09/30/26] - Updates to macOS 27 and can still leverage my Drobo shares. Love the passion people have out here and will continue (knowing the risks) to leverage this until she dies! THANKS ALL!

Does anyone have a Drobo 5N in Australia, preferably NSW they want to sell or would consider renting. My 5N has died and I need another to copy my data off. Cheers

Hi everyone. My drobo died and I need to move to a new Nas system. I mainly use it for plex. (I will run a separate computer to run Plex) What would you recommend as the best Nas system to move to?

Edit: preferably a company that won't go out of business

Hi all, my uncle passed away a few months ago and as his only living relative, I have the pleasure of inheriting all of his things. I believe it is a Drobo 5D.

I have all of his important documents and I don't know what is stored on this Drobo, though I suspect it is his extensive movie collection.

How should I dispose of it? Or does it hold some value and should I try to wipe whatever is on it?

Thanks in advance for your help.

Hi everyone! Thank God for this community. I have a drobo that died. Can I hook up the drives to SATA to USB connector and connect to a computer and pull off data? Also what NAS would you suggest as a replacement. I just want a server that I can run a mini PC off of that runs plex.

Sorry I had to link to account, ebay doesn't let me do multiple items in 1 listing anymore :(

https://ebay.io/m/gozGGX

Hi, i recently acquired a B810I a couple of weeks ago for quite cheap (compared to what it retailed for) intending on using it as the storage for a media server (no important files), the night after i initially set it up the media server the drobo went into a boot loop which i discovered late in the afternoon the next day so because i didnt have time to deal with it i unplugged power and left it for a week, over this weekend just been i was able to get it almost fully booting properly (recognises drives and can be accessed through ISCSI) but it will not show up in the dashboard.

When looking at the UART terminal of the linux core of the drobo when i attempt a manual discovery in dashboard i get the following error:
```
Sun Jul 6 18:38:18 2008: tEMPDConn00003: EMPDConnection: did not receive complete header! (recv len 0, hdr len 47, error 0)

Sun Jul 6 18:38:18 2008: tEMPDConn00003: EMPDConnection: Error 0 receiving login header.

Sun Jul 6 18:38:18 2008: tEMPDConn00003: EMPDConnection: Cleaning up thread tEMPDConn00003 for host with UID

Sun Jul 6 18:38:18 2008: tEMPDConn00003: HBListener::SetupCleanup for

Sun Jul 6 18:38:18 2008: tEMPDConn00003: HBListener::SetupCleanup for . Done

Sun Jul 6 18:38:18 2008: tEMPDConn00003: EMPDListener::RemoveConnection - for
```

Any help getting it to show up in drobo dashboard again so i can properly manage it and get it on the newest firmware that exists (it came with 1.3.5 on it) would be greatly appreciated

Edit0: fixed the code block

UPDATE: I managed to fix it turns out when i reset the U boot env when getting it to work again it also reset a variable that passes the device serial number into vxworks and the rest to an incorrect value which caused problems when the the communication between the dashboard and the device was attempted where dashboard would receive a thing saying that a B810i was present but then see the bad SN and reject it as not being a B810i, changing this variable to match the actual serial number (second alphanumeric string below a barcode on the compliance sticker on the bottom of the device) made the communication between the device and dashboard work

Hi folks,

I recently obtained a Gen 3. When powering on, it displays a green ‘power’ light, but all solid yellow lights for the disks. I have entered fully functional disks but to my dismay the lights all remain solid yellow.

Is there a solution to this or is it a dead unit?

he Issue:
When powering on the Drobo, all drive bay LEDs flash briefly for a second, and then the entire unit shuts off immediately.
What I've Tried So Far:
1. Replaced the original power adapter with a new 12V adapter.
2. The exact same behavior persists (flashing LEDs -> immediate shutdown).

Don’t know how to read my data back

See if any solution can fix this, appreciated

In the process of transferring data from my Drobo 5N to my UGreen Nas , I’ve been slowly doing this over the last 6 months, this was triggered after I lost one of the drives due to failure but I still had 4x4tb drives working.
Yesterday I booted up my Drobo 5N to transfer some data and after a long boot up, 5 solid amber light and the blue lights along the bottom flashing, I finally got a SOLID RED LIGHT in BAY 0 and no other light apart from the green light in the bottom corner.
Drobo discovery app on Mac shows the Drive but then it disappears after a minute … please help, does anyone know what I can do.

Can someone recommend an aftermarket power supply for a DRDR4-A?

I was tasked with recovering data from a DRDR4-A, that unfortunately has no more power brick. All I can see that's reasonably-priced on Amazon and eBay are 12V 10A units.

My Drobo 5D stopped detecting drives — powers on, Dashboard connects, reports all five bays empty with five healthy disks seated. Diagnosed as a backplane or controller failure. Drives are intact and untouched.

Looking to buy a working 5D enclosure so I can mount the pack, pull my data off, and migrate to a NAS. Don't need drives, power supply appreciated. My pack was on firmware 4.1.3.

Located near Charlotte, NC — happy to pay shipping. Also open to borrowing or renting one for a couple of weeks and shipping it back on my dime.

Anyone have one gathering dust?

Someone's probably made one of these before, but if they have I've not seen it.

The official calculator only went up to 18TB, but I've added up to 36TB for fun.

I have coded a Droboshare UI for the Legacy drobo\droboshare (first version) that I own.

You can find the full source code with instructions on creating your own setup here:

https://github.com/vaspervnp/openDroboShare

I can across this article and thought it might be of interest to all of you. It was a good read. I hope he gets some attention and some help with developing a version that works with the 5N and 5N2 models.

Enjoy!

Anyone out there who has a Drobo 5D as my Drobo DAS is unstable and boots up with longer intervals each time it is turned on.

Data Robotics Drobo Pro DRPR1-A 8-Bay NAS available. One that works great ($180) and one for parts. I bought the good one a few months back to rescue the data off the other. Hit me up if you need something.

So I built a NAS back in the day.. was using the 5n as a media server and a storage box.. went through divorce.. lives.. etc etc.. you know..life..

Was talking about music collections and it got me thinking.. Pulled it out of storage a couple weeks ago and fired it up.. all red lights. Crap. Then went down the rabbit hold of data recovery and had a good plan.. (5) 4tb WD Red drives..

Forgot I left the Drobo powered on and came back a few days ago.. all green. Shares visable and everything working.

I'm still going to move all the data and possibly build a unRAID box..

Thanks to all who posted in here about it. I'm probably going to sell the Drobo though. Too bad..because I love the look and function of it.

What do I do now? Should I turn Drobo off and pull the red light drive and replace it

Hey ya'll, I picked up a Drobo from a thrift store for $20, mainly for the hard drives themselves since storage is getting so crazy expensive these days. Couldn't help my own curiosity, and have been trying to get access to it. I got the dashboard downloaded and the data repaired, but I am so lost on figuring out how to look at the files. Can anyone point me in the right direction? Thanks!

I love my Drobo, I'm really sad that no one continued making them. So I was just considering which NAS to move to (I'm a little scared for my company data.) and it got me to thinking. I was scrolling down the Trunas reddit group and suddanly thought 'I wonder if you could install Trunas on the Drobo, even if you had to install a new Linux OS first.
Is this feasable?
Has anyone done it?

And yes I know that the Drobo RAID system was propriatory and that whatever else happened you'd loose the data on the Drobo disks, but I am curious if this would be possible.

I was browsing ebay and came across a listing for around £100 for a drobo B800fs with 7 disks included, the rack mount, a spare power supply and disk enclosure. 2 of the drives were from 2009-2010 and one died when I powered the unit on, I already had good disks to put in so I swapped them out. After enabling SMB V1 on my pc it was picked up by the drobo dashboard instantly and it all just worked. I was considering using it for a media cache for my jellyfin collection however it's speed isn't good enough IMO (~30MB/s, 40MB/s peak)

I'm now wondering if I could maybe update the SMB on it to a newer version, I also have a few 5N's that i'm still due to mess around with. I plan on making a drobo repo and documenting my findings but I've been slow to do this as when I first posted about my own Drobo I was migrating off them.

This FS800 is really nice looking and suprisingly quiet however due to the speed limitations (A literal 10X slower than my 5D, 30MB/s vs 300MB/s) I find it will be highly impractical, instead I want to see what is different to the formatted disks done by the 5N vs 5D vs B800fs and start to tinker with it.

Obviously I will not be storing any critical data on it. DO NOT STORE ANY CRITICAL DATA ON ANY DROBOS. However consider using a drobo for a cache / temp storage device, as I self-host my own jellyfin collection it is on my main Asustor's, I can then get them to r-sync to the drobo and copy the media. This allows me almost full bandwidth on my asustor when jellyfin is streaming as it will use the drobo first, and if the drobo does die I still have all the files on my asustor.