Data Robotics Drobo Storage Robot review

Data Robotics Drobo Storage Robot Review

Posted on 2008-01-27 13:30:43 by Thomas De Maesschalck

Data Robotics have come out with a wonderful storage solution that not only provides oodles of storage space, but also, redundantly backs this data up across multiple drives. The best part of this system is there is it requires minimal user intervention. Their product is the Drobo, the world's first storage robot, which is a one stop solution for redundant data protection. The Drobo is an external storage device with four user accessible hard drive slots that use 3.5" SATA hard drives. The maximum capacity of the Drobo is only dependent on current hard drive size limits.Setup is beyond simple and fairly idiot proof.

Link: DSM

Data Robotics Drobo Storage Robot

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Re: Data Robotics Drobo Storage Robot
by robbyx on Thursday, April 17 2008 @ 18:09 CEST

I just read your Drobo review and wanted to share my experience with the product. I don't think you should be endorsing it.

I pre-ordered my Drobo, so consider me an early adopter. At first, I *LOVED* it. Innovative, slick, and a worthy alternative to RAID5, I thought. After applying the first firmware update, the Drobo rebooted and my Mac informed me that the connected disk was unformatted and asked what I wanted to do (Initialize, Ignore, Eject). As you can imagine, I was immediately filled with panic and dread.

Over the past five years or more, I've built a huge (legal) music collection. I'm a music freak and buy between 5 and 10 CDs each month. I had painstakingly ripped each and every one of my 2000+ CDs to the Drobo, both in Apple Lossless format for my home stereo and AAC format for my iPod. I can't even imagine how many hours (hundreds?) I spent doing this. I also took the time to verify all of the metadata (artist, album, etc) and correct any tag errors. As you can imagine, this was VERY TEDIOUS!!!

Recently I've been ripping my DVD collection and converting it to MP4 for my Apple TV. Each rip/conversion takes between 3-4 hours. A hundred DVDs or so and you're looking at another 300 hours of time spent.

So, I called Drobo tech support. They walked me through a procedure that involved removing and re-inserting the drives. At first this didn't work. Then the tech told me to change the position of the drives in the Drobo. Voila! It took about three days to "protect" the data. After this process had finished, my data was back and I was much relieved.

Until the next firmware update.

The most recent update completely hosed my data. This time, tech support's procedure didn't work. It took 12 days to "protect" my data and when all was finished, my data was lost. Throughout this experience, I made efforts to contact tech support. I sent them my Drobo's diagnostic files, as requested. Someone from Drobo sent me the occasional terse email saying "This is a high priority case!" or "Please be patient!" A month later, how patient am I supposed to be???

A few months ago, I contributed a review of Drobo to Macintouch.com. I'm a regular contributor. I praised it and encouraged others to give it a shot. Needless to say, after my recent experience, I wrote to retract my recommendation and explain why. I sent a copy to my Drobo contact's email in the hopes that it might inspire Drobo to actually DO SOMETHING about my problem.

Would you care to hazard a guess as to how Drobo responded?

THEY CLOSED MY CASE (on April 10), despite the fact that:

1) I'm a paying customer.
2) I'm under warranty.
3) I was an early adopter who put my faith in them and their product.

They don't care one iota that I lost 2TB of data that took me years to accumulate and organize. At this point, I've accepted that my data is gone. However, I'm DEEPLY DISAPPOINTED in the utterly pathetic response I've received from customer service.

As you can well imagine, I'm very angry and frustrated. My experience is not unique either. There are others on DroboSpace.com and various forums (I've been searching!) who have all encountered the same problem.

Thanks for listening. I hope my experience has provided another perspective on this troublesome product. More importantly, I hope that it has demonstrated how insincere Drobo is about customer service.