First the unboxing and intro:

See the rest of the post for an update - you will want to read up.

So the first day I already managed to mess up my drive array to the point where its all Red and thus in critical condition.

So... how did this happen?

I started out with 2 drives, and added a third. No problem. Then a 4th drive while also transferring data. Also no problem.

500GB
1TB
250GB
400gb

And then as my disks were getting full, I added a single 1TB drive in the 5th and final slot. At this point I had already stopped transferring data and all was green = everything OK.

I wanted to move over my other 1 TB drive (Seagate Pipeline HD 2) to replace the 250GB drive. I checked online for the best way to do this and all I found was that you simply remove the drive, and replace it with the new one.

Except... that I read that if you remove it and its doing its thing (shifting data around to the other drives) that you should not remove any more drives or add any more. Note I did not have dual drive redundancy on - but I should have in hindsight.

Drobo reported it was going to take 2-3 hours to complete so I let it run and I went to do other things.

I come back over 2 hours later and find that Drobo dashboard reports that

An additional drive was removed
Too many hard drives have been removed. Please re-insert the removed hard drives.

Only problem was, I did not remove any additional hard drives! So I put the 250GB hard drive back in hoping things would be alright.

Nope, still same thing.

I contacted technical support, got Level3 - tech said I will need to clone out my 250GB drive I removed.

I'm waiting to hear back from support (he's busy with someone else as of a few minutes ago), so I will need to source another 250GB drive.

I'm not happy... (This is now second day of owning Drobo 5N).