Steady Green
A steady yellow light can appear next to one of the empty drive spaces or next to a drive that’s already present. This isn’t a horrible thing, it’s just the Drobo letting you know protected space is running low and you should add an additional hard drive. If next to an empty drive bay, you should add a hard drive there. If next to a drive already installed, Drobo is telling you it’s the smallest drive of the lot, and that you should replace it with something bigger.
A steady red light can appear next to an empty slot or next to a drive that’s already installed. The message is very similar to a steady yellow light, except that you’re really, really close to running out of space, or some of your data may now be at risk if something bad happens. In other words, you ignored the yellow light for too long, and you should stop what you’re doing, head to the store, and pick up a bigger drive to add to your Drobo. 
What’s that Drobo doing when all the lights are blinking green and yellow? Well, his job! In order to keep your data safe, the Drobo will file your bits and bytes to a varity of different drives, make copies to store somewhere else, and other tricks up his sleeve to make sure that when one of those drives inevitably fails (all hard drives fail at some point), every piece of data will be safe and sound. The reason the lights blink is a subtle warning that while this magic is happening, you shouldn’t take out one of the drives until the blinking stops.
(Siren, siren) Red Alert! All hands to battle stations! One of the lights next to an installed drive is blinking red. A drive has taken a turn for the worse, and no is no longer functioning. Don’t be alarmed though… that’s what Drobo is for! 
The lights on Drobo are a great feature. That said, I suggest that in the next major revision the Data Robotics team finds a way to redundantly present the info provided by the lights. In plain English -- providing this information by color alone is not sufficient. About 8-10% of the male population has red-green color deficiency (so-called "color blindness").
As somebody who does design for a living, I'm keenly aware of the consequences of ignoring this issue. A reasonable percentage of Drobo users WILL have difficulty telling the difference between a red and green status. Obviously not a good thing!
Sure, Red and Green and Yellow are used in traffic lights. But there is redundant 'coding' in traffic lights -- people who are "color blind" learn which position corresponds to which color meaning. Unfortunately, you can't do that with the current Drobo.
Solving this problem is harder than pointing it out. I'll open the floor to ideas from others, but some possible ideas include...
- LEDs that have a state other than RED/YELLOW/GREEN
- An additional LED, so there is positional info (e.g, BOTH have to light in an error case, for example
- Ability to present LEDs at different brightness (e..g, Red one is REALLY bright and Green is dim -- in this case a color blind person can still notice the bright light as indicating an error condition)
- An optional buzzer (user configurable so in an various cases it beeps at you -- not just a color blindness feature -- a nice way to get advance warning for those of us who simply aren't going to notice our Drobo lights turning red tucked away on the top shelf on day number 843 of it having operated perfectly OK for over 2 years!
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