Drobo (Second generation)

Pros: Shiny, black

Cons: Cut me, bad service, prone to instability

Summary: Before I begin, I want to say that the unit suffered from problems and would reboot seemingly at random, quite often.

I was keen to get this device up and running to back up my gigabytes of photos, as I am a professional photographer. I was willing to overlook the slow performance (in line with the review), and I even recommended it to a few of my peers, until about a week later when one of the hard drives crashed. Recovery of data on this thing is really miserable. I called tech support and was put on hold for over 2 hours. Then, when I finally got through, I was told that I had set it up wrong when I had clearly followed the directions. Even after following the advice of the customer service representative, I couldn't recover the data. Good thing that I hadn't deleted my photographs from my RAID array or I would be out years of work thanks to this product!