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"If you value your data, DON'T trust this thing!!!"
1.5 starson by tahoerobPros: Looks slick
Cons: Firmware updates destroy data
Summary: 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.
- 12 replies to this review
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I'm DROBO user in Japan. What I'm currently experiencing is exactlly the same with you (connected disk was unformatted and asked what I wanted to do). So, could you tell me much detailed procedure to change the position of the drives in the Drobo? You changed the position of HDs while DROBO is on and connected to PC? Changed all the positions of HDs? Please help me out losing my family photos!!
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Gvies this setup a shot. DIY, but you save quite a bit of cash and it gives you much better performance.
http://frankleng.me/2010/05/01/zfs-powered-nas-the-ultimate-alternative-to-drobo-droboshare-the-complete-guide/ -
Seems like everyone has problems with Drobos. I bought five of these to back up photos at my photography studio. Three went bad withing five months. Spent countless hours with tech support and wound up recovering the data on only one of the three bad units. BIG EXPENSIVE MISTAKE. Don't trust your data to Drobo, YOU WILL BE SORRY!
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Good review. Read your story but it was too late, I had already bought one. I have 181 hours left before it protects my data, after inserting a new 2TB HDD. Took me 36 hours to copy 1.5TB to an external HDD.
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To update...I was able to recover my data with the amazing DataRescue II from ProSoft Engineering. It took a while, but I got everything back. Organizing it again was a real pain!
As for the backup argument, yes, you're right, one should have a backup always. However, as my experience is clearly not unique (more like commonplace it seems with Drobo!), I'd say that Drobo has some serious issues. Firmware updates should not hose data. I'm sorry, but there's no excuse for that. Hire some decent programers and don't make your customers your beta testers!
After much round and round, Drobo finally reimbursed me for my Drobo unit and took the worthless thing back. There are so many great NAS/RAID boxes on the market that, given the wealth of negative Drobo experiences that grow like weeds across the web, only a fool would buy their product. -
same crap different day, check out my experience with the new DROBO S,
http://www.refracted-light.com/blog/2010/1/23/my-first-30days-with-drobo-s.html
DROBO's site says "Simple Scalable Reliable"
I say legal action... -
I can't believe how many negative comments this review has gotten. My DRobo bombed out as well, except we didnt run any firmware updates at all, nor did we mess with the drives. 2 TB worth of data lost and all we did was plug it into another computer.
Sure, you can argue that a backup should've been made. But what if the DRobo is being used as backup storage? This product bills itself as safe, reliable RAID storage and it isn't hard to find cases of it simply erasing all data with little or no warning.
The fact that a backup wasn't made has no bearing on the quality and flakiness of this product. Even IF there was a backup, the review is spot-on with my experience with a Drobo. -
Backup, backup, backup. It even gave you a second chance but still no backup. Mistake.
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i am currently going through the same sort of thing with their support. I am shocked how bad they are. Their first contact with me would have failed the Turing test. Fortunately I haven't (yet) lost the data, but I spent so much on their stupid product that I cant afford to buy anything else.
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Rule number one for all storage subsystems. If you are going to do a firmware update or your going to change the array configuration, expect the system to reformat the drives. They all do that. BACKUP YOUR DATA FIRST!
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As much as i understand yuour loss, this is not really drobo's fault IMO as A) you should of backed up your data (and technically you did from the sounds of it), and B) knowing that your were going to patch it you should of copied your data to another location (ie back it up).
Drobo offers a NAS, it only becomes a back up when you store your data else where! Redundancy is not the same as back-up!
Other than that i feel sorry for your loss, but i am pleased it is not perminante. -
i have lost data. oh man that is the worst feeling. quick question: did you back up the data? that was my big takeway when I lost my data. what is that saying, there are only kinds of hard drives, ones that have failed and ones that will fail.
