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.
