Drobo 

Drobo is now in bankruptcy. I found this out when I tried to get help with my prematurely failed 5D3 unit. They promised to send me a loaner unit to retrieve my lost data but they never did and now will not even reply to my emails.
Worse, I spent ~$2,300.00 to purchase a Synology storage and 5 HDD's.
Even if Drobo emerges from bankruptcy, do not purchase from them or you too will suffer.

Buyer beware!

Company offers poor support, no timeframe for software fixes that have plagued MacOS for years.

Im left with a partially working device, with no fix in sight.

A quick look at their store makes you feel that they are going out of business.

I wish I could give less than one star to this company. And it has everything to do with customer service and standing behind their product. My 5D at the end of its warranty and they were requesting payment to extend it, only to find out they what support thunderbolt 2 drives. Within seven days of this warranty expiration my power supply to the drive failed. I had to go on Amazon to purchase a aftermarket 12 V supply so I can even turn this thing on. What I would expect if there was a known issue would be some sort of communication prior to failure. I had to learn about it all over the Internet from other people with similar situations frantically trying to find power supplies so they can continue to work their jobs. I’m sorry time is money and if there was a problem here it would’ve been nice to have known something was up so I may have prepared for it. The other thing is maybe since I’ve been a loyal customer with two generations of Drobo’s you might offer some sort of discount on an updated Thunderbolt drive?? Car companies send out notifications when they’re re-calls so people don’t get killed in accidents, But I’m sorry this is our job, we have to have access to these files to work, and when they just stop working then that’s a problem that costs me money. You may wanna hide behind it to save reputation then to admit that there is actually something wrong but it has made me leave your company to go to a different brand and I hope others will as well. During Covid you were not even answering the phone with technical questions back in 2020. Whoever is the person hired to ensure customer service support should be held accountable for your losses when everyone walks from your company. That bone headed person is likely the person who gets paid the most in your company which is preposterous. Your product is only as good as your support staff, which is crap

Unbelievable bad customer service, I wish I had known before I bought it.

I had 7 Drobo's and if they work they are good albeit a bit slow. However since Mac OS Catalina there are constant issues with the Drobos ejecting themselves unfortunately Drobo support is absolutely usless. It often takes weeks to get a reply and then they ask another question which again takes a few weeks to get the next reply. Then the advisor changes and he will start asking you the same questions again. No resolution to the problem so I now got rid of all my Drobo's beside one and moved to OWC Raid Drives as they do have excellent support from the US and not somewhere in India or the likes. The only company with equaly bad support I know would be Telstra here in Australia.

terribly slow customer service. 45 days for my case yet as a brand new drobo 8D refused to mount my drives that worked fine in the 5D before and well over a week in the drobo 8D after migration. of course you cannot go back afterwards. they are now with development and promising a custom firmware. Very frustrated with them and will not buy another drobo ever. googling shows this is common with their service and they should really get sued more often. Im talking too their VP of Support now and he seemed sympathetic. Hope this lights a fire..

Great products - I own 6 Drobo units (3 x 2nd Gen Drobo, and 3 x 5D3 Drobo units).

Customer service is fantastic - very helpful when I had a problem and went above and beyond to rectify it.

Would strongly recommend.

Thank you!

Had a Drobo with 5TB Drives in the bay for 8 years and when one drive failed the system worked and my data was still available on the others. I simply replaced the offending drive. Dashboard is simple and easy to follow. So why 1* - simply that when something goes wrong, as mine did, Drobo completely wall themselves off from you in terms of support. My Drobo failed to mount to my desktop over a month ago although the drives are all showing as healthy. Reading the tech help, I followed the basics and drew a blank after which the advice online was to do a file repair noting that this could wipe data. I elected to take it to a local repair shop instead to see if we could get the data off the drives before attempting the repair. My local repair guy has tried for weeks now to get the data off the drive and also tried e-mailing Drobo support and even ringing them in the USA to seek their advice (there is no UK Support) he and has drawn a blank with defining silence. He has now even tried cloning all the drives to attempt the repair on the clones and still no joy. He refuses to charge me for his services as he maintains he has not effected a repair ( that is good customer service for you) ....meanwhile I shall not go near another Drobo again. I used to recommend them to colleagues, but shall no longer do so in the light of this experience. There are better devices out there, and once, or if, I can recover my data from what are healthy drives I shall invest in something else. I would caution anyone to think twice before buying Drobo devices.

Device software/firmware is temperamental and there are NO support contact numbers, only a system where they take weeks to respond, only then to tell you that they are getting an engineer to look at the issue, at which point they end up closing your support case and ignoring further messages.

I will not be spending my money with them again. There are better more established alternatives out there.