Dell Precision 5820 tower and Drobo 5C

Question

I have a Dell Precision 5820 tower with the following specs, 32GB ram, Windows 11 Pro, previously running Windows 10 Pro, NVIDIA Quardo P4000 24MB, C: and drives, 475 GB (200 GB free) and 931 GB (590 GB free).

I have this situation where the Drobo 5C after a three or four minutes of inactivity appears to go into a sleep mode. I do a lot of image editing in image software from Adobe; Lightroom, Photoshop, and Illustrator, as well as Corel Painter and Escape Motions Rebelle. There is nothing more frustrating than waiting for a save or lookup on the Drobo as the the connection times out and I have to wait for whatever communications get re-established.

The status lights on the Drobo do not change indicating any errors and I've contacted Drobo support a number of times over the last two years trying to diagnose the problem. Unfortunately I've for the most part only received level one support, i.e. try a different USB port, a different cable, rotate the cable. et cetera, until recently where Drobo has stated that the fault lies with Dell.

I've gone through all the updates on Dell's site and I've also contacted Dell, sadly with no results.

Has anyone else encountered this situation or perhaps have a solution?

Many thanks!

Chino de Oro · Answer

If you haven't try this yet, check under changed advance power setting, enable and disable USB selective suspend settings to see if it makes any difference.  Otherwise, set your power plan to ultra performance.

tkryton · Answer

Thanks, but I've done all that. These are the things I've tried based on advice from Drobo. swapped USB cables swapped USB ports always had the power plan set to high performance walked through every possible USB setting to ensure sleep settings were disabled rotated the USB cables so that they were 180º to the original orientation ensured that all the BIOS and other drivers were up to date contacted Dell for assistance and never received a response

Tesla1856 · Answer

There is a setting in the Power Profile for HDD spin-down time, but I don't recall if it applies to HDDs on the other side of a USB-Controller (I don't think it does). Anyway, be sure that it set to 60 minutes or whatever.

My actual experience (with USB-based external HDD enclosures) is that HDD spin-down time is controlled inside the USB device. Most pre-made WDC and Seagate ones seem to properly spin-down after 30 minutes of no activity (read/writes to it). I had a WDC one a while back that had a Settings Utility that could set it to whatever you wanted or just off. I have a Vantec external enclosure ... I contacted their support and they sent me a special firmware that had a 30 minute spin-down burned into it.

Since you want it to NOT spin-down ... seem like it would be easy to create something like a Windows Scheduled Event that copies a small dummy text file to it every 25 minutes ... seems like that would keep it awake.

tkryton · Answer

Thanks, but I'm running the 'high performance' power settings with the hard drive set to power down after an hour. You're probably also right in that because it's an external USB device with its own power settings it wouldn't have an affect. The Drobo 5C remains active throughout, it the 5820 is disconnecting from the Drobo about every three or four minutes. It's especially annoying when I'm working on a project in InDesign or Corel Paint and I have to wait for the system to update the file it's working on every three or four minutes. It's really annoying when working in Lightroom on a batch of images where because of the images I'm editing I can knock off in under two minutes and the system goes to sleep and I have to wait for the 5820 to reestablish a connection.

Tesla1856 · Answer

@tkryton wrote:

The Drobo 5C remains active throughout, it the 5820 is disconnecting from the Drobo about every three or four minutes.

Oh, I see. That's a different issue.

Back when USB-3.0 was first released, I did have various "disconnect issues" with various machines and external-HDDs all of a sudden (all Windows-10 back then).

Most eventually went away. I always assumed it was due to Dell BIOS/Firmware updates and Windows-Updates (driver updates ... likely Intel-Chipset drivers). My Aurora-R6 has a special controller on-board for it's "AS-Media" USB-3.1 Controller and Dell eventually released a firmware-update specifically for it. It seemed to be more-stable after that.

I also noticed that some USB-HDDs came with these really cheap/thin cables so I upgraded them to nicer ones (high-quality with thicker gauge wires inside).

I can't really point to one specific fix, but all of the above are easy enough to do. Now-days, all my issues seem to be resolved (all USD-HDDs and machines are fairly old).

I mostly rely on a Synology-NAS now-days. It's ethernet-based and I have it configured with Synology's Hybrid RAID-5 tech.

Finally, be sure the Drobo and all it's internal drives pass Diagnostics. I've been able to check my USB-HDD SMART-status with Crystal Disk-Info (or the free Passmark SMART utility). Over the years, I have discovered spinning-drives that are getting too hot (and disconnecting) and even some with bad-sectors (that SMART is trying to deal with).

tkryton · Answer

It's been a slow day today and the issue has become personal.

I went down the rabbit hole that is the internet and may have actually found the issue, I hope.

I dug into the device manager snap in and found that deep down in the Drobo's properties I was getting a warning that the device could not be started with an error of Code 10.

The device trouble shooter has been removed from Windows 10/11 but can be invoked from the CLI with

msdt.exe -id DeviceDiagnostic

Running the trouble shooter fixed the spastic driver and I'm hoping that the issue has been resolved. If not I may be back.

Thanks to the site makeuseof.com for hopefully the correct solution.

Precision Fixed Workstations

Dell Precision 5820 tower and Drobo 5C

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