A few months ago, my Drobo suddenly stopped working. In fact, everytime I switched on my computer system, the entire house would trip. I thought it was the UPS that was short-circuiting, so I bought another, only later to realise it was not the UPS that was faulty. Thinking that the culprit was the Drobo, I called up Shashinki where I had purchased it from, and was told to send it to them for repair or replacement (it was still under warranty).

I didn't want to courier it to them, so when I had an outstation trip, I decided to drive down all the way to Skudai, Johor and deliver the Drobo by hand. Upon arrival at the shop on 29 Oct 2018, I met Dr. Koh King who is the man behind Shashinki, and he pointed out that most likely, it was the power adapter that was at fault, not the Drobo unit itself. Unfortunately, he said the adapter was not covered by the warranty, so I left the adapter with him, and over the next couple of weeks, he had tried to get hold of a new one, but it took so long that I finally decided to buy it online from Amazon on 17 Dec 2018.

To my surprise, the new power adapter from Amazon arrived on 31 Dec 2018 instead of the estimated 15 Jan 2019, and after plugging it to the spare UPS and connecting it to my PC, the Drobo 5C was alive again, and backing up all my datafiles successfully. Actually, the Drobo was out of action for so long that it auto-detected its firmware and dashboard software had to be updated to the latest version, which it performed promptly. Below you can see it straddled on top of the two UPSs.

Drobo 5C on top of APC UPSPJ Home, Lorong Utara, Petaling Jaya, Selangor.

Drobo 5C with new power adapter is now working and plugged into APC UPS.

NIKON D700 - Ver.1.03
Standard - Capture NX-D 1.5.1 W