SpinRite says drive is good, but Drobo disagrees

[rakosnik]

I have a 4 TB Western Digital Red drive. I have run SpinRite on it multiple times and on different levels (including level 5). The first time I ran SpinRite on it, SpinRite had to recover a few spots, but since then SpinRite hasn't found anything. But when I put the drive in my Drobo, the Drobo flashes a red light in that drive bay indicating that it thinks there is something wrong with that drive.

I usually think of SpinRite as having a better handle on the health of a drive than other sources, but in this case the Drobo seems to be more sensitive about the health of this drive than SpinRite is.

#1 Any idea why SpinRite no longer see anything wrong with this drive, but the Drobo doesn't like about it?

#2 Is there any way to change things, so that my Drobo will accept and use this drive?

#3 Would you ever use this drive to store data?

I don't want to throw out a red drive this large that seems so close to being good to use, but I know that would be better than losing data with a drive I shouldn't have been using. Right now I'm just trying to figure out which category I should consider this drive to be in.

 

[ColbyBouma]

The Drobo is probably looking at the SMART data. Would you be willing to share any of your SpinRite logs? They are in the SRLOGS folder of your SpinRite boot drive.

 

[PHolder]

but the Drobo doesn't like about it

Presumably whatever SpinRite did to recover data has broken the RAID (or whatever the heck it is that Drobo uses) and so the Drobo is unwilling to resume "normal" operations on it. You really shouldn't ever try to repair a drive outside of a RAID type system before doing anything/everything you can on the inside first. (Many RAID systems have their own maintenance tools and schedules for this very reason.)