I saw the horror stories after I had ordered mine. Sure enough mine started to fail just before my warranty was up. I went through the troubleshooting steps on the site which seemed to work temporarily but it soon began disconnecting again.
Which brings me to the absolute worst part about the Drobo. The customer service. I spent over a month troubleshooting the device with them when they finally said that for $129 the would replace it since it was not out of warranty. Even though the problems started while it was under warranty they wanted to charge me. I said no way, threw the POS in the trash and will never buy another Drobo product again.
What is the point of having a RAID setup, when you have a single point of failure like the actual Drobo device. I got a couple of Iomega 2TB FW800 drives that were the size of my Mac Mini instead. The are roughly twice as fast as the Drobo on transfers, spin up a lot faster (the Drobo was always going to sleep and took some time to spin up when I needed to access it). Sure, the Iomega drives aren't in a raid setup, but the raid setup on the Drobo is pointless anyway.
I'm glad I am done with them and regret having spent my money on that junk device in the first place. I should have paid more attention to the reviews.
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The Drobo is a piece of junk. Sounds like a great idea, but even over FW800 the transfer speeds are sub par. The worst thing though is how unreliable it is.
I was thinking about getting a Drobo, but I started reading about the issues that people were having with it, pretty similar to what you experienced, so I ended up taking it off my Want list. I think it sucks that this device is supposed to give you peace of mind with your data only to fail (at least for a small percentage of people). I'm thinking about going to online backup route with Carbonite. Even though it's a lot slower in terms of transfer time, it's a worthy trade-off for better reliability.
Consider BackBlaze if you're looking at Carbonite. BB will backup external drives too, which was a major selling point for me.
I've been using my Drobo for about two years now without any issues. The only issue I had was that the original configuration default was 2TB and now I have four 1TB drives and it shows up as two separate drives. Using the firewire connection I find the drive to be considerably faster than USB and I stream music and video from it daily. It is somewhat noisy at times but having placed a piece of rubber under the unit has pretty much dampened any of the external noise.
Having used NAS drives, RAID systems, WHS and the like I find the Drobo to be far and above the easiest system to use. I've gone through several power outages, blown circuits etc without loss of data. I do on occasion run diagnostic software on the drives ie. Spinrite to see if there are any issues. If there are I just swap the drive out, as the unit is running and everything reconfigures itself. I too have three of the Iomega drives: two 500GB and one 2TB drives, I do not find them to be any faster than the Drobo and I have had one unrecoverable failure on one of the 500GB drives, though I generally like them too.
I've been relatively happy with the Drobo customer service in the past. I've had issues with creating share points on the Drobo for streaming media files with Snow Leopard Server and have had to contact Drobo on a couple of occasions. On both occasions it was determined to be problems related not to the Drobo unit. Having had issues with RAID setups on other machines such as hard drives not being the same geometry, trying to rebuild systems after drive failures I could not recommend more a system like the Drobo. I question whether the other reviewer has ever had similar experiences.
Having used NAS drives, RAID systems, WHS and the like I find the Drobo to be far and above the easiest system to use. I've gone through several power outages, blown circuits etc without loss of data. I do on occasion run diagnostic software on the drives ie. Spinrite to see if there are any issues. If there are I just swap the drive out, as the unit is running and everything reconfigures itself. I too have three of the Iomega drives: two 500GB and one 2TB drives, I do not find them to be any faster than the Drobo and I have had one unrecoverable failure on one of the 500GB drives, though I generally like them too.
I've been relatively happy with the Drobo customer service in the past. I've had issues with creating share points on the Drobo for streaming media files with Snow Leopard Server and have had to contact Drobo on a couple of occasions. On both occasions it was determined to be problems related not to the Drobo unit. Having had issues with RAID setups on other machines such as hard drives not being the same geometry, trying to rebuild systems after drive failures I could not recommend more a system like the Drobo. I question whether the other reviewer has ever had similar experiences.
P.S. As to the online backup I would recommend CrashPlan www.crashplan.com. I am currently using Mozy backup with about 160gigs of online backup files. Originally when I signed up for the service it was about $80 for two years unlimited backup. I was notified yesterday that the pricing will change on the renewal date to about five times the price. I've been told by several friends that CrashPlan has great pricing and they also have the ability to backup to your own hardware at a remote location. So if you wanted to place a Drobo at your office you could use this as one of your offsite backup locations. Check it out. If you are a current Mozy user I believe they have a 15% discount if you go to www.crashplan.com/mozyonover
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