One More Point to Ponder - Returns

I recently received this comment which brings up an important point:

"Got this last 1/2 of June. Then waited for about three weeks for HDD to arrive from NewEgg, I was traveling anyway. So it was July before opened the black box. I couldn't get my iMAC to see this or quit loosing the connection when it went to sleep so I put it aside because the Lion update just came out.

I upgraded to Lion and it got a lot worse, hard to believe, but it did. So it went back into the box waiting for updates.

Over the past month I got it out of the box again and updated the drobo dashboard to "fix" the Lion issue which didn't work (drobo solution on the forums is to roll back Lion to Snow Leopard, yeah that's' not going to work for me).

I can not use it with Apple Time Machine because it looses the connection every time it wakes up or like yesterday NEVER connected without rebooting both machines AND took over 5 minutes to see it AND I still couldn’t save anything to it (yes I was logged in as a registered user).

About 1/3 of the time it doesn't show up on my Win7 laptop at all either, but to be fair even then I can usually still access it using a \\drobo\ even when it doesn't show up in Explorer.

I'm really not happy with the product and have been very patient in waiting for updates, etc, from the company. So I contact the supplier B&H Photo. Yes I know your usual policy is 30 days, however I waited for Apple update, Drobo to update, and guess what it still doesn’t work. I explained this, it’s too old? Go sell it myself?

So I should have just returned it earlier because you say it’s too old because I waited for updates to see if that resolved the problem. Nope, go sell it on your own.

Okay, as promised there will be a WHOLE lot of bad press around me selling it on my own because I’m going to have to agree with drobosucks here (interesting the drobosucks.com points to drobo) should tell you something."

This is a warning to those who think that they will buy a Drobo and return it if it doesn't work.  Due to the nature of the Drobo, it is very time consuming. It takes a long time to set up, diagnose, troubleshoot and get support. You will inevitably wait and wait for updates and/or support. As the weeks of waiting go by, this is when the typical 30day vendor return policy to lapse. This is especially true if you attempt to have a replacement sent from Drobo.

All the time and headaches spent trying to make it work will ultimately cause you to be unable to return it. On my first encounter with a drobo, I had to pay my vendor a 40% restocking fee after unsuccessful attempts at making it work. In reality, it only worked for two weeks but it took 3 months to determine it was crap.

Be warned... if you decide to purchase a Drobo and have difficulties, return it immediately. Attempting to diagnose the problem will cost you valuable time and may cause you to be an owner of an expensive brick.

A Pleasant Surprise

I was recently contacted personally by one of the Drobo support staff. Data Robotics came across this blog and offered me a refund for the troublesome Drobo S which I happily accepted.  I am thoroughly impressed by the gesture.  I think that I have been a little hard on the support staff at Data Robotics. In general, the support staff were good but the product is poor.

After receiving news of the refund, I will admit that I felt a little guilty about starting this blog in the first place. At this point, I have no major complaints about the service and support staff.  Throughout the numerous problems, they were attentive and helpful. In the end, though, I am leaving this blog in place because I still wouldn't recommend the Data Robotics products to anyone.  An outstanding support staff can never make up for an inferior product.

Here is an excerpt from my e-mail response which sums up my overall thoughts:

Thank you very much for the follow up.  I am very impressed and happy with your offer for a refund.  It was certainly unexpected.  For simplicity, I will happily ship the working Drobo S back to you at my expense.  All you need to do is give me a shipping address.  When you receive the package, you can refund the same Visa I used for the order.

 

I’m sorry it had to come to this.  In the end, I would rate the service and support excellent with one small exception.  Sometimes the support tickets submitted online are not responded to in a timely fashion. In general, the service and support goes above and beyond expectation.  The problem is more fundamental.  The product is generally finicky, unreliable and does not offer any chance for self diagnostics.  Even the smallest problems require a support ticket to diagnose... even if the problem wasn’t caused by the Drobo itself (ie. hard drive failure).  In addition to the ‘closed’ nature of log files, there are reported instances of data corruption through no fault of the user.  The forum is filled with cases like that; especially using the network attached devices.  Data protection is the cornerstone of your business. Considering the price of the products, random data corruption is completely unacceptable.  In the instances of seemingly predictable data corruption, a CHKDSK repair is the usual solution which does sometimes work but it should never come to that. I haven’t had to use CHKDSK since the days of DOS yet I was running it twice a day using your DROBO!!!  It is a shame because your storage systems offer so many advantages over traditional external hard drives and network attached storage devices.

 

As always, I am more than happy to respond to questions and provide comments regarding technical and non-technical issues.  Feel free to contact me further if you would like any more information.

The Last Time

I have successfully received the replacement Drobo S.  I inserted the drives as instructed and my data is good again. In the next few weeks, I'm going to transfer it to a different storage system but I'm not sure which one yet.  The Drobo S is going on Kijiji shortly thereafter.  Anyone want a slight used Drobo S?!?!

I'll post again after I migrate to the new system and sell the Drobo.  Talk to you all soon.