Hard drives are cheap but unreliable. Drobo is comparatively expensive and claims to be more reliable. So naturally I’m extremely disappointed that my Drobo spontaneously vanished from my desktop after just one month of ownership, and no amount of rebooting and restarting would mount it. I am further disappointed that tech support took nearly a week to respond to the trouble ticket I submitted online and that all the information I had painstakingly typed into the trouble ticket form had been lost, requiring me to reiterate all the information again via email.
The ensuing week of email exchanges was irritatingly slow; it seems to me the entire ordeal could have been done in minutes on the phone. I provided all four of the diagnostic files I had saved since discovering the problem, but was told the “file” (singular) was incomplete. I then sent 5 more diagnostic files collected using different machines and ports and was eventually told they indicated there was nothing wrong with the Drobo or my computers. The next two pieces of advice were things I had already tried (Disk Utility and TechTool) and the third was to try DiskWarrior, a $100 piece of software I didn’t own.
My will broken, I bought DiskWarrior online and in 10 minutes or so my Drobo was repaired and mounted just fine.
So, the issue is, for now, resolved, but the resolution is extremely disconcerting. First of all, I had to spend $100 to fix a problem with a brand new device whose price tag is justified by its being “reliable.” I got in touch with a helpful Drobo employee via Twitter who informed me that sudden power losses can cause the kind of disk corruption, but, call me lucky, I’ve never had an ordinary hard drive less that say, 1.5 years old go bad like this, and I’m sure the majority of them have seen as many or more power outages than this Drobo has. There are at least 5 other hard drives in my house that have been in use the entire time I’ve had the Drobo and would have been subject to any power outages the Drobo experienced, and none of them are having any problems. (No, I’m not counting my laptop drive, which of course has a battery it can fall back on.) Suffice it to say I unimpressed if a device built for reliability is more sensitive to a power outage than a bargain bin external USB drive, and the 3 8-year old drives in my 2001 PowerMac.
Secondly, this feels more like triage than a resolution in that no diagnosis was offered, only an expensive treatment. As a tech-savvy consumer and software developer, I like to know a little more about what went wrong and be somewhat in-the-loop when it comes to the health of the device to which I’ve entrusted nearly 2 TB of data. The possibility of power outages causing the problem is something I found online in another customer’s review of the Drobo. Tech support emails merely barked orders at me (“get diagnostic files,” “connect to different ports,” “run disk repair,” etc.) and when I asked if the diagnostic files had shed any light on matters I just got a curt reply saying they showed no issues with the drives or the Drobo. In the end I have no reason to believe this won’t happen again, though if it does at least I can skip straight to running DiskWarrior and skip the 2 weeks of useless email.
My lasting impression of this experience is that Drobo tech support regarded me as a nuisance rather than a person, and that Drobo is ignoring the possibility that their product is putting my data at even more risk than it would face on ordinary disks. That said, I’m a patient and curious person, and I’m just lazy enough that I’m not going to migrate to another product just because of this incident. Indeed, I’m still quite taken with the Drobo’s unique features and, aside from this two week interruption, it is working as advertised.
Tags: Drobo, rant, review, storage, tech support, thumbs down
May 18, 2009 at 8:34 pm |
Hey Mike, yeah, I need to do something like this to back up my data… might stay away from the drobo though.
May 18, 2009 at 9:05 pm |
I don’t actually use mine for backup; I keep all my DVDs and TV shows on it so I don’t have to walk to the DVD shelf (see http://plexapp.com). But it is frequently billed as an excellent companion to Time Machine. For Time Machine I actually use an ordinary 1 TB external USB drive. Since my primary machine’s main HD only has a 250 GB hard drive and I only need about 100 GB of that constantly backed up, the 1 TB external is plenty.