Comments on: DO NOT BUY A DROBO!!

By: kinto

kinto — Fri, 05 Mar 2010 23:43:06 +0000

i won a drobo from scott bourne last year for making a macbreak weekly video. i immediately slapped 4 brand new 1.5TB seagates in there… excited to never worry about data loss again. i’ve had no issues with it at all until last night when i got home from work and it wouldn’t mount. 1 soild red light at the top and the other 3 not lit at all. i figured it was a drive gone bad so i checked their site to verify colors. the site says solid red on top indicates full capacity (but with 3 solid green as well… and as i said mine is 1 solid red and that’s it.)

here’s the thing… for over a year now the capacity has been 3 blue lights, about 30% full. yes, i’ve been consistently saving more data to it, but in an entire year it hasn’t even increased to 4 blue lights. capacity full? ummm… right. so if that’s true then the blue indicator lights don’t work?

ugh. my only option now is to buy a 2TB drive and hope it’s just blue light suckage. but if full capacity IS my problem then their ’solid red-green-green-green’ code is incorrect too. in any case, if i am actually able to salvage my data i’m just getting 5 external drive cases and dealing with manual duplicates myself, because after this headache and everything i’ve read i don’t trust this thing at all anymore.
…

and on a sidenote… the drobo site says to update your firmware you should first backup your drobo. ok, so now this product requires a SECOND 6TB drobo to backup the first?!?!? or should i just burn like 4000 backup DVDs?!?!? isn’t the entire selling point of these things that it’s a LARGE, SAFE place to keep your data?

By: Rob

Rob — Wed, 03 Mar 2010 23:10:50 +0000

My Drobo Nightmare was similar.
After much research I decided to get a Drobo as I had read positive reviews ( I didn’t dig deep enough to find the real truth )
After setting the thing up with brand new 1TB drives I copied all my data across to it. This took approx 10 hours.
Once done it was up and ready and my primary source of data.
One of the things I wanted it to do was to host my Tunes library. Straight away I noticed jitter with playback?
The thing was so slow I couldndn’t even stream itunes from it??
Well all was well apart from this for an hour when Drobo says one of the drives has failed. ( Go Figure )
Well I hot swapped another new drive and it started to rebuild the file system, or so I thought, until it went into a looping reboot session. I had to power the thing off and then back on and then after another 10 hours it says the file system is ready. But uh oh the drive now won’t mount. You guessed it, I lost all my data!!
Lucky I had a backup. But the thing is I had bought the Drobo as a raid solution so I didn’t have to have multiple fire wire drives everywhere.
A bit of digging on the internet and I find many tales of horror stories about the Drobo.

I tried to take the thing back but my vendor told me I had to go through trouble shooting with them etc. I have the latest dashboard and firm-wear on it and since I am a Systems Administrator I believe I know what im doing.
I didn’t deserve this pain.. I think its only a matter of time before someone powerful takes a class A action against the manufacturers.

In the end I now use my Drobo as my backup container. I use Chronosync to do nightly mirrors from my precious data drives to the Drobo. I also use it as a Network Time Machine drive for 2x Macs.
If the Drobo goes down well I have only lost my backups which are just mirrors anyway.
It’s been two weeks now and this solution is ok so far.

The Drobo has turned out to be a ‘pretty’ but expensive and slow backup container.

If you are thinking of using a Drobo as a primary storage container and thinking you have data protection, please think again.

“DONT DO IT YOU DONT DESERVE THE PAIN”

By: john

john — Tue, 23 Feb 2010 06:57:19 +0000

I lost 2TB exactly like this. Rebooting over and over again until failure. Customer service took an entire month to call me back. Over 2 months to tell me my data was gone and that they never had a problem like this before. Incredible. They know what’s going on. It’s a Toyota situation. Somebody like Pouge from the New York Times or Keo Laporte will lose their data sometime soon and then there will be a class action suit. They need to recall all the units or at the very least let people know what’s going on. There’s tons if other people on the web reporting this issue.

By: admin

admin — Sat, 20 Feb 2010 01:26:11 +0000

Not true. I let the piece of shit Drobo run for over a week.

By: William

William — Sat, 20 Feb 2010 01:10:32 +0000

Hi, I had a very similar experience with my Drobo. My second gen drobo last almost 1 year. I have had to get it replaced twice now. I lost data twice, unrecoverable from data recovery software because of the proprietary drobo. So I had to reformat both times. Now I am on my third drobo and the same thing is happening again. It just reboots over and over and over again. It is useless. This time I learned my lesson and had everything backed up on another drive.

One the bright side, customer service is great. they send the new drobos free of charge 2 day mail. But what good is it if it just keeps happening.

Also my dad has a gen 1 drobo and he had the same problem. But he through his away instead of going through the trouble.

By: Josh

Josh — Thu, 04 Feb 2010 19:39:06 +0000

Can’t believe I didn’t see this before buying 2 DroboS’s. Had 3 WD (Caviar Green WD20EADS 2TB) hd’s die in a week, in 2 different drobos (By the way these are the hd’s drobo recommends you use). Contacted Drobo and they point the finger at western digital and western digital points the finger at drobo. After reading this post I wish I had done more research. To anyone else considering Drobo, think again.

By: Anatomy of modern user-base containment: Drobo Inc. | SpringAmp

Anatomy of modern user-base containment: Drobo Inc. | SpringAmp — Sat, 09 Jan 2010 17:59:35 +0000

[...] have better things to do with their time unless they are very frustrated like Fraiser Spiers, or a few others. And product review sites like CNET let a few people air sour grapes but don’t provide [...]

By: Bob

Bob — Tue, 05 Jan 2010 09:04:35 +0000

You had a bad drive. You should have kept your backup until after Drobo did it’s thing. The Drobo unit did nothing wrong. Deal with it.

By: james

james — Mon, 04 Jan 2010 08:01:10 +0000

get this! My Drobo didn’t have any drives go bad, no updates applied (as many people have lost data after installing updates), no power failures, and i still lost everything after years of it working well- it decided to delete every file, EXCEPT for a few folder trees with no data in them! I HATE this thing- $50/year at Carbonite and this wouldn’t have happened… I trusted their ’self-healing’ system

corporate files, CAD docs, and all my photos are among the lost… I loath Drobo! thanks for letting me share…

By: gary

gary — Thu, 17 Dec 2009 11:57:52 +0000

sounds like drobo are supported by apple support people

hehe

ohh and I only found this place cos my droboS is in an infinate reboot loop, it landed here 32 mins ago . . . . .