Thunderbolt plugged Drobo 5D

[charlesbelisle]

Hi,

I'm a owner of a Drobo 5D Thunderbolt plugged Hard Drive Enclosure and was wondering if you have any idea why it's the only TB3 device I can't make it work on my Hackintosh

I even have problems to boot the machine as seen in verbose mode (see attached)

Any idea why this problem occurs? Why the device seems to be detatched in the verbose screengrab?

Thanks in advance!

 

[OmegaRed1723]

I have two Drobo 5Ds attached to my Hackintosh, and it was tricky to get them to mount. It took a number of power cycles of both the Drobo and the Hackintosh before they would appear. I think part of the problem is that the Drobo takes so long to boot and go through its initialization before mounting.

 

[charlesbelisle]

I have two Drobo 5Ds attached to my Hackintosh, and it was tricky to get them to mount. It took a number of power cycles of both the Drobo and the Hackintosh before they would appear. I think part of the problem is that the Drobo takes so long to boot and go through its initialization before mounting.

Oh, I see. I successfully mount it after a few restarts as well.

Have you noticed at which stage it's better to plug it? Stage of the Drobo startup or the Clover startup?

And have you noticed if the Drobo stay stable after it's mounted and the computer doesn't need to be restarted?

 

[OmegaRed1723]

From what I’ve read about Thunderbolt and Hackintoshes, the TB device needs to be powered on before turning on the computer. If you power the Drobo on, the drive bay lights will flash, then the blue capacity lights will start to light up in sequence as the Drobo moves through its initialization. After the initialization the disk array will go into standby mode if it isn’t connected to a running computer. This is indicated by a yellow light to the left of the capacity gauge. At that point, plugging the TB cable into the Hackintosh and booting the computer brought the Drobos out of standby and they mounted. The timeout is set to zero on my clover configuration, so the system boots directly into macOS.

Since the initial trouble of getting the Drobos to mount, they have been extremely stable. The computer just had 11 days of uptime before a reboot was required after updating a piece of software. It has also been restarted on other occasions, and every time the Drobos have mounted successfully after the reboot. My use case is pretty simple though: the computer is on 24/7 with the Drobos always connected. Given how finicky TB is on Hackintoshes, I wouldn’t be using the interface otherwise.

 

[charlesbelisle]

From what I’ve read about Thunderbolt and Hackintoshes, the TB device needs to be powered on before turning on the computer. If you power the Drobo on, the drive bay lights will flash, then the blue capacity lights will start to light up in sequence as the Drobo moves through its initialization. After the initialization the disk array will go into standby mode if it isn’t connected to a running computer. This is indicated by a yellow light to the left of the capacity gauge. At that point, plugging the TB cable into the Hackintosh and booting the computer brought the Drobos out of standby and they mounted. The timeout is set to zero on my clover configuration, so the system boots directly into macOS.

Since the initial trouble of getting the Drobos to mount, they have been extremely stable. The computer just had 11 days of uptime before a reboot was required after updating a piece of software. It has also been restarted on other occasions, and every time the Drobos have mounted successfully after the reboot. My use case is pretty simple though: the computer is on 24/7 with the Drobos always connected. Given how finicky TB is on Hackintoshes, I wouldn’t be using the interface otherwise.

Thanks @OmegaRed1723 that's exactly how I'm going to use my Hackintosh. As a 24/7 opened computer

Thanks for the clarifications!

 

[Middleman]

I have a Drobo 5D attached to my setup too using an Asus EX3 card. The issue of the power cycling is to do with the system having to provide enumeration to the TB3 devices before they can be recognised. One way to also do it is initialise them first via Windows before rebooting back into OSX.