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.
Congratulations to you on getting something back from Drobo on this. I thought by Drobo was sliced bread for the last 2 years, then when I tried to get a performance issue addressed, things became a nightmare. I generally agree with you, it's not the support individuals, it's the product. That said, I did have a bad experience with one of their "top" tier representatives. It's hyped and promoted in a way that seems great on the surface, but once you have to start to trouble shoot problems its a nightmare.
ReplyDeleteI recommended drobo for 2 years, no I'm telling everyone I can to stay away from it. I hope you keep this blog up so others can learn from your experience or share their problems. I'm normally not litigious, but I wish there was a class action suite against drobo right now, I'd gladly jump in.
I have the Drobo FS. I replaced an Iomega drive (There products are worse and would give iomega customer service an "F" grade). Anyway, my Drobo has worked great, only complaint is that they should not recommend WD Green or Black drives or any any workstation type drive. Enterprise only drives with no latency issues. Even if you set up drives to never sleep, most HD will spin down and when you want to access first time each day they can take up to a minute to connect.
ReplyDeleteI have just taken stock of a Drobo and Droboshare as pre-loved unit. To be honest I wish I had seen this blog beforehand. It is becoming a nightmare. Hours spent getting it working, hours re-spent getting it working again with Droboshare and not there yet. It's recognized on my XP computer but not on my Windows 7 and their response to tickets is minimum of 2-3 days. Maybe so long because they have so many problems with support due to the devices not being stable and robust enough? When I do get to support the switch on the device, switch it off, take cable out etc. process is tedious and lengthy and I am always worrying if the data will be corrupted in the process. If the procedures could be documented on their support site I could do it without calling them on an international call. Luckily I found a company (Planet Talk) who only charge a minute cost per minute! Hey Ho... back to trying to get it to work. Just glad I am not one of their support guys having to face so many frustated customers...
ReplyDeleteDroboShare is really a nightmare. Apart from being VERY slow, I can regularly and repeatably cause it to cut all network connections and it frequently causes NTFS volume corruptions with no reason at all. I would suggest anyone to just avoid it and build a small access server. Of' course this denies the whole purpose of buying Drobo, especially since they don't offer a cheap 4-bay USB/Gigabit Ethernet box.
ReplyDeleteDrobo FS turning into a nightmare as well. I have so many support tickets and they send these lame responses and nothing solves the issue except they note the issues is solved in their trouble ticket system if you don't respond to their response in 48 hours, yet they take almost a week and sometimes longer to respond to the open ticket.
ReplyDeleteI used to love my Drobo, now I hate it. I used to tell everyone they were awesome, now I tell everyone to stay away. Drobo Sucks!
Here is a list of all my problems.
Files Saved in Public Share Not Found on Different Workstation: Status: Unresolved
Volumes Mounting Multiple Shares
Status: Unresolved
Public Files Disaapear
Their Status: Solved
My Status: Unresolved (Still happens)
Volumes wont mount automatically (have to manually log out and log back in and manually mount)
Their status: Solved
My Status: Unresolved
Drobo slow to map shares
Their Status: Solved
My Status: unresolved
Drobo fs latency on initial read
Their status: Solved
My Status: Better but not perfect
Bad Replacement Drive
Solved
System Resource in Use
Solved
Noah wrote:
ReplyDelete"Public Files Disaapear
Their Status: Solved
My Status: Unresolved (Still happens)"
This is exactly what I'm talking about. What kind of external drive allows files to simply vanish??? I can put up with all sorts of technical problems and workarounds, but I couldn't possibly live with disappearing files. My biggest issue was the random file corruption, but it wouldn't surprise me if files went missing too.
Thanks for the comments!
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.
ReplyDeleteI 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.
FIRST.
AVOID DROBO FS LIKE THE PLAGUE. IT'S BLACK. SO WAS THE BLACK DEATH. IT DOES NOT WORK AND PROBABLY NEVER WILL.
SECOND.
AVOID B&H PHOTO. THEY CARELESS ABOUT CUSTOMER RETENTION AND SATISFACTION. SO OTHERS TAKE CARE. THIS WAS ONLY MY SECOND EXPERIENCE WITH THEM. THE FIRST WASN'T MUCH BETTER, I CALLED TO ORDER THEY OFFERED ME AN UPGRADE AND I TOOK IT ONLY TO FIND OUT LATER THE "UPGRADE" WAS A REFURBISHED PRODUCT WHICH WAS NEVER DISCLOSED. ARRGH!
Please don't feel bad about making this site. Data management is too and personal to take lightly. it's trusting someone with your kids and work...now you understand!
ReplyDeleteI've been in IT for 20 years and few hard drives have failed on my watch. I've got NAS Raids, Raid 0/1 boxes and nothing fails. Reading these Drobo comments sounds like a Nightmare.
The only reason a consumer needs a Drobo is due to the ability to hot swap drives and make the net gain larger...no other reason as all other needs can be handled by another device that is faster and happiers.
If you are on a Apple then why not just have a fire800 (or better yet thunderbolt) single big drive (external) and an equally big USB drive for Time Machine and both be under the cost of a Drobo.
Time Machine is to good to need a Drobo.
Can't agree more how Drobo Sucks.
ReplyDeleteCurrent Status of my Drobo-FS: Switched OFF (best choice ever)
Besides very slow, losing folders & (corrupting)files.
Unable to share in a combined Windows/Mac network. Folders created by windows are not seen by Mac, and visa-versa.
The DroboShare slows network connection to "hold. My Drobo-FS would NOT recognize it's own Admin Password. Thus unable to access folders, or "saved" files.
Resetting using special code did not help either. Lost about 8 TB on Data, but more important: months of my life-TIME.
My Advise, if you see Drobo for sale: Don't buy it. (not even from me) I would feel guilty selling the FS to you.