By now, I am into this Drobo and Drobo Share for more than $1000 and that doesn't include the hard drives or countless hours of frustration. At least the office is getting some use out of the system and it is relatively stable. I regularly need to restart it to reestablish the connection but it always seems to get running again. But there is a new problem that I just can't explain, random file corruption and folder oddities.
The majority of our office work involves AutoCAD. Some mornings, the AutoCAD file I was working on the previous day is corrupt and I am unable to recover it. Restoring a previous backup file was necessary to keep working. I thought it could have something to do with the nightly backups so I continued to monitor the situation. Eventually the random file corruption started happening throughout the course of the day. We were constantly having to restore backup files all over the place. Another complaint was placed with tech support.
Over the next few weeks of screwing around with log files and tests with tech support, they finally sent me a replacement unit c/w drives. It was at this time that admitted that they don't recommend certain hard drive brands and models. One of the main reasons I purchased a Drobo was because I could use any drive and any size. At least that is what their perky Cali Lewis website demo videos explicitly say.
I hooked up the new Drobo and Drobo Share and installed the new drives directly from Drobo with high hopes of success. When the first file became corrupt, I took it out of service immediately. In the end, I only had about two weeks of working 'up' time for the three months I owned it. I was able to get a refund from the reseller but with a 40% restocking fee. I purchased a real NAS (Seagate BlackArmor) and all new drives. It has been working flawlessly for almost a year without even one minute of down time or maintenance.
Over the course of the Drobo experiment, I lost $400 on restocking and countless hours of troubleshooting and headaches (100+) which I will never recoup. Not impressed.
Its really time-consuming and annoying when you have a corrupted file to fix and restore. Troubleshooting is giving me a headache.
ReplyDeleteI had 2 Drobo's (2nd gen) just for business and personal data backup. I went through hell with those things and now they're just lying in the closet. I would never recommend anybody buying a Drobo ever.
ReplyDeleteBoth Drobo's almost instantly died, each on another location. Not reachable, not resettable, data was gone. Drobo took them back and replaced them for refurbished ones. Not new ones. No, used ones with scratches and stickers on them. I wanted them to die.
The Drobo's eat hard drives. About every few weeks there's a red light blinking because a drive is "broken". At first, it cost me a fortune to replace those every time. But when testing the drives in other machines they turned out fine. The Drobo's are just corrupting them all the time. This happens on different Drobo's! And then all of a sudden it goes "rebuilding", taking 100+ hrs!
The Drobo's are slow as hell. Firewire 800? My ass! The more files you store, the slower they get. After a while it takes for ever just to spin up. Copying lots of files or big files is just not working.
Droboshare is completely crap. It's randomly disconnecting (unmounting all servers on the network) and resetting seems to be impossible, even by the pinhole.
I can't believe this company still excists after releasing this kind of products.
Never again!!!