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.
