Drobo

I just read your Drobo review and wanted to share my experience with Drobo. I don't think you should be endorsing it.

I pre-ordered my Drobo, so consider me an early adopter. At first, I *LOVED* it. Innovative, slick, and a worthy alternative to RAID5, I thought. After applying the first firmware update, the Drobo rebooted and my Mac informed me that the connected disk was unformatted and asked what I wanted to do (Initialize, Ignore, Eject). As you can imagine, I was immediately filled with panic and dread.

Over the past five years or more, I've built a huge (legal) music collection. I'm a music freak and buy between 5 and 10 CDs each month. I had painstakingly ripped each and every one of my 2000+ CDs to the Drobo, both in Apple Lossless format for my home stereo and AAC format for my iPod. I can't even imagine how many hours (hundreds?) I spent doing this. I also took the time to verify all of the metadata (artist, album, etc) and correct any tag errors. As you can imagine, this was VERY TEDIOUS!!!

Recently I've been ripping my DVD collection and converting it to MP4 for my Apple TV. Each rip/conversion takes between 3-4 hours. A hundred DVDs or so and you're looking at another 300 hours of time spent.

So, I called Drobo tech support. They walked me through a procedure that involved removing and re-inserting the drives. At first this didn't work. Then the tech told me to change the position of the drives in the Drobo. Voila! It took about three days to "protect" the data. After this process had finished, my data was back and I was much relieved.

Until the next firmware update.

The most recent update completely hosed my data. This time, tech support's procedure didn't work. It took 12 days to "protect" my data and when all was finished, my data was lost. Throughout this experience, I made efforts to contact tech support. I sent them my Drobo's diagnostic files, as requested. Someone from Drobo sent me the occasional terse email saying "This is a high priority case!" or "Please be patient!" A month later, how patient am I supposed to be???

A few months ago, I contributed a review of Drobo to Macintouch.com. I'm a regular contributor. I praised it and encouraged others to give it a shot. Needless to say, after my recent experience, I wrote to retract my recommendation and explain why. I sent a copy to my Drobo contact's email in the hopes that it might inspire Drobo to actually DO SOMETHING about my problem.

Would you care to hazard a guess as to how Drobo responded?

THEY CLOSED MY CASE (on April 10), despite the fact that:

1) I'm a paying customer.
2) I'm under warranty.
3) I was an early adopter who put my faith in them and their product.

They don't care one iota that I lost 2TB of data that took me years to accumulate and organize. At this point, I've accepted that my data is gone. However, I'm DEEPLY DISAPPOINTED in the utterly pathetic response I've received from customer service.

As you can well imagine, I'm very angry and frustrated. My experience is not unique either. There are others on DroboSpace.com and various forums (I've been searching!) who have all encountered the same problem.

Thanks for listening. I hope my experience has provided another perspective on this troublesome product. More importantly, I hope that it has demonstrated how insincere Drobo is about customer service.

Five months ago a drive starting acting strangely. We emailed Drobo Tech Support asking if we should replace the drive. They said no.

Several weeks later, the drive in question failed. We emailed tech support letting them know that it failed and that we had ordered a new drive to replace the failed drive. They wrote back and said that we would not be able to replace the drive and keep our data. We would need to take the drobo to a data recovery center. We were baffled. The product description on the website says:


"As long as Drobo has two hard drives, it protects you from a drive failure. If a drive happens to fail, you do not lose access to data, which means that you can keep on working. Just swap out the failed hard drive and replace it with a new SATA drive of any size."

And yet, Drobo tech support was telling us that this was not the case. We have yet to receive a logical explanation of why this is the case. We took the drive to some data recovery specialists and were quoted between $3,000 - $24,000 to restore the lost data.

If you are considering buying a Drobo, I would strongly advise against it. We have emailed customer service several times and have received no reply. We even started emailing the CEO of the company several weeks ago and he has not replied.

Do yourself a favor and purchase a backup solution from a company that will stand behind their product.....or at the very least reply to your emails.

Updated on Mar 26, 2013

Just wanted to update the review because Drobo did get back to us and are going to restore our data from the old unit and are upgrading us to a better unit. I really do appreciate them going above and beyond what we had initially asked for, which was just that they help us retrieve the data somehow. I am willing to give this new unit a chance since it seems less prone to failure.

If you don't yet believe the negative reviews, please trust this one. I read all the ones about how the Drobo would crash within 6 months taking people's data with it, and yet a friend persuaded me to try it. Foolishly, I agreed. I bought my Drobo FS on Amazon. Needless to say, just as advertised by a lot of folks here, the Drobo became inoperable within 6 months and would not mount. This is a terrible product, and their customer service is even worse. My issue was "put in the queue" with no timeframe and no concrete action steps on how the problem would be addressed. DO NOT BUY this product. It's a time bomb.

UPDATE: I have been dealing with Drobo customer service regularly since the issue and since posting an initial review. I have been handed off to three different representatives, all of whom have been catastrophically unhelpful. Each one just stalls by asking me to generate and re-generate their esoteric diagnostics, while my Drobo and all of the drives inside (about $1,500 worth of hardware), sit there like a paperweight. Apparently Drobo doesn't care about you or your data. How can a company whose reputation has everything to do with trust allow such callous and reprehensible behavior by its agents? How could anyone EVER buy this product??!?

Updated on Apr 22, 2012

UPDATE 4/22/12: After frustrating experience with Drobo customer service, I attempted to reach out to the Drobo CEO directly, who actually responded to me by phone. Their customer service efforts redoubled, they picked up the Drobo from me and repaired it in-house, which took a month. They upgraded my Drobo device and returned it with the data salvaged, and an extra 2TB harddrive. I am satisfied that I have all of my data back, and that they were finally willing to take the device in-house for repair. In our initial conversations, customer service told me that they could not take it in (not their procedure) and that there were things I could try to do at home to resolve the issue. Obviously, this was a crazy idea, if it took them A MONTH to get the issue resolved in-house.