As the title says, I am saying goodbye to my Drobo, the full story is below.

Bye Bye Drobo

About 2 years ago when Data Robotics first released it’s Drobo product I was one of the first to get in line to get one.  When I got the Drobo I was so excited, it came in an apple-esce style of packaging, the device is sexy and it was really easy to setup.  I even loved how easy it was to upgrade by adding drives and even had a drive fail and it worked great.  But then came the day when I could no longer read the data on the drive.  I sent the Drobo and the 4 drives back and got it back in working condition with the files.  I was without the files for almost 2 weeks though.

Then I had another failure, this time I got a new Drobo and the old one was RMA’d.  I was good for a while until suddenly my drive was corrupt and I could no longer write to the drive.  At the suggestion of Drobo technical support I ran a recovery program which did seem to get back most of the data but put it all in one big folder and I had to sort through everything, a real pain.

Thinking that maybe the problem was the windows 2003 server it was attached to I purchased a droboshare and also the 2nd Generation drobo.  So I put the old drobo on the droboshare and the new one on my mac with firewire.

The new one has needed reformatted twice since I have had it.  I am using it as a time machine drive so not a big deal unless my mac would die before I got another time machine backup.

But, now the drive where I keep good data is having problems again.  I moved it from the droboshare to a mac mini hoping the problem was with the Drobo share since it just disappears from the network after a few minutes.  But, the Drobo itself is what disappears.  Even on the Mac Mini.

I am now trying to get my 2 TB off of it but have to do it a few gig at a time, then power down the mac, then the Drobo.  Power them back up and start copying data again.  It is going to take a long time to get the data off of this thing.  So I am again spending a ton of time on the Drobo.

So this is the end of the Drobo for me.  After I get my data off this it will be disconnected for good.  Afterall, this thing is supposed to keep my data safe and all it has done so far is lose the data for me.  It is sad because the concept is a great one but the implementation has major issues.  And this time I am not even going to call support.  The Drobo support is horrible and all they do is blame it things like power.  After the first time they told me it was power (and it was plugged into a UPS with the computer) I purchased a dedicated 1200VA UPS just for the Drobo.  It can hold the Drobo up for hours.  But the problems did not go away.  I am tired of them playing the blame game and not fixing the problems.

I feel bad because in the beginning I was having great success and the device was awesome and I talked it up to some of my friends.  But after the glitter fell off and it’s true color showed through, it is something I would recommend people stay away from.  I was amazed when I started searching for a solution to the latest problem, there are tons and tons of people that are having the same problems I am having.

So now I am on the search for a replacement solution.  I am looking at freenas as one possibility as well as QNAP.   QNAP seems to have a similar solution to drobo with their TS-419P but has more features and does not use a proprietary file system.

Next Post: Step by Step Hackintosh

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