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Author Topic: DROBO painfull upgrade  (Read 4721 times)

mdijb

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DROBO painfull upgrade
« on: January 06, 2016, 10:25:24 pm »

I Purchased and upgraded from DROBO gen 1 to DROBO gen 3.. Their website indicate that Migration from the old to the new drive was easy but this did not turn out to be true.  The migration did not work and after several hours on the phone with tech support, the conclusion was that it would not work.  I know my device is old but DROBO needs to provide much better support to maintain their business.  No upgrade to the current stuff should be this difficult.

I had to copy all the files on My old Device to a separate , temporary location, and then upload these to the new device.  THIS TOOK MULTIPLE HOURS AND WAS NOT EASY OR EFFICIENT.

I understand that companies continually upgrade their stuff and want to keep up to date, but this does mean they should penalize for using a device that worked well for  7 years and make the upgrade so problematic.  They are making me suffer for Their device that worked well for  a very long time--they should be praising their stuff, making it easy to upgrade, not making me write a nasty complaint about having to start from scratch like I never existed.

MDIJB

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rdonson

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Re: DROBO painfull upgrade
« Reply #1 on: January 07, 2016, 01:01:48 pm »

I currently have 2 Drobo second gen 4 bay DAS units attached via FW800. 

My experience with their support has been very frustrating.  They've never fixed ANYTHING for me.  The materials said that I could create a partition on the Drobo and use that for Time Machine.  It eventually corrupted and then their answer was it was an Apple problem.  Apple said it was a Drobo problem.  Further investigation on my part favored Drobo's "thin provisioning" as being incompatible with Time Machine.

My Drobos have been reliable since deleting the Time Machine partition but I would NEVER again buy their DROBO Care.  They claim its "worldclass" but don't substantiate who gave them that title.  The diagnostics are mostly encrypted and only they can know what the diagnostics report.

They also won't fix problems with older Drobos.  For example, a friend had a power switch go bad.  They wouldn't fix it. 

For upgrades between Drobos they've modified their stance a bit on what can be done.

http://www.drobo.com/resource-center/migration/

Despite all this I did buy a Drobo 5D and its working fine so far.  It's much speedier over Thunderbolt than the old ones on FW800. 
« Last Edit: January 07, 2016, 01:05:44 pm by rdonson »
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Regards,
Ron

Chris Kern

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Re: DROBO painfull upgrade
« Reply #2 on: January 10, 2016, 12:12:59 pm »

My experience with their support has been very frustrating.  They've never fixed ANYTHING for me.

Similar experience here.  Well-engineered products, incompetent or unresponsive support.  My impression based on several fairly simple inquiries is that the support reps know little or nothing about the products beyond what is provided to them in a canned problem-resolution matrix.  (Outsourced maybe?)  In particular, they seem to have no access to information from the product developers about the implementation of the various supported filing protocols.

I use a Drobo 5N as a weekly secondary back-up device for my primary file server, a vanilla Linux box.  (The primary back-up device is another vanilla Linux box, which performs hourly back-ups.  I use Google "Drive"—i.e., cloud storage—for tertiary offsite back-ups.)  The Drobo is actually reasonably configurable as filing appliances go, but I've learned to treat it as a black box: it does what it does.  The documentation is primitive, the tech support reps are unable adequately to respond to anything but the simplest of questions, and any customization you perform, even if nominally supported, may be bollixed up by some future minimally-documented firmware update.

As a black box, used as a back-up device, I've found the 5N to be both extremely reliable and reasonably responsive for network-attached storage.  But I personally would be nervous about using any Drobo—even a channel-attached local device—as my primary filestore.  Because if anything went wrong, you really wouldn't have any recourse.
« Last Edit: January 10, 2016, 12:29:29 pm by Chris Kern »
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westfreeman

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Re: DROBO painfull upgrade
« Reply #3 on: February 19, 2016, 04:23:43 pm »

Ive had several Drobos and they do have their +'s & -'s  they can be great but I had one die the support was lacking and I had to buy a new unit and transfer the date from the HDs to another drive   I'm not sure I'll ever buy a new one again. Just bought a Synology 1515+ and there is so much more to it. A bit more complicated to set up but more useful once set.


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budjames

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Re: DROBO painfull upgrade
« Reply #4 on: June 19, 2016, 01:47:41 pm »

I just replaced a Drobo FS with a Synology DS 1815+ on my gigabit network for redundant backup storage. I installed a Synology DS 1515+ at my office for offsite backup duplication.

The home network DS 1815 realtime syncs with my working Photos library on my 4-bay ThunderBay RAID 0 attached to my iMac 27" 5k via Thunderbolt 2. Files are the. Synced one way only to my DS 1515 offsite.

I use Chronosync to backup my working photos drive to a Drobo 5D attached via Thunderbolt 2 each night so that I also have a current local backup.

My new Synology setup just replaced a Drobo FS on my local network and a pair of Transporter Syncs with external 4th drives, one on my local network and the other at my office. I needed more storage capacity and was growing concerned that the Transporter software would not advance as the product is no longer sold and the company is on its third owner. The new owner only sells the institutional models which start at $3,000 and go up to $20,000+.

I have only had the setup working for a few days, but so far so good.

Regards,
Bud James

www.budjames.photography
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Bud James
North Wales, PA [url=http://ww
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