Drobo – Sometimes Good Comes from Bad

Well, I recently had a very interesting experience dealing with a company. This is a sad story with a happy ending. I had  serious problems with my Drobo system and had decided to write them off as a vendor when Drobo stepped up to the plate to resolve things. The true measure of a person or a company is how they deal with things when they go wrong and, in this case, I am impressed.

I’ve had some issues with my Drobo equipment and haven’t really mentioned them here before. I am reluctant to publish a very negative review until everything around the issue is settled. One of the things I did during my switch from PC to MAC was to replace my older ESATA disk array with a more reliable product. Drobo was recommended by a lot of photographers, so I upgraded to a Drobo S in June of 2010. I had some challenges finding an ESTATA card that it liked, but is was resolved by simply buying the card Drobo recommended.

Everything was fine until last December when my unit failed. Not just had an error.. failed..stopped working..refused to boot. Nothing I could do helped, so I phoned Drobo tech support. They quickly determined I had a catastrophic failre and shipped me a new unit. A couple of days later the new unit arrives, I plug in my old drives and everything is fine – until a week later it fails AGAIN. No response, no warning, no possible recovery. My disks are fine, but completely unreadable by anything other than a Drobo, which means they are paperweights. I phone Drobo support again, they quickly send me a new unit. It works fine, but I do NOT trust it in the slightest. I am NOT a happy customer at this point.

I went out and pursued another solution that would let me have a mirrored copy of the drives and use the drives in anything if the chassis failed. I left the Drobo running to make sure it worked and intended to simply sell it on eBay.

This plan sat on the back burner until March when I get a marketing email from Drobo and Tom Buiocchi, which recently joined Drobo as the CEO. He mentions in the email that he wants to hear from Drobo customers with either good or bad stories. I chuckle and move on. A couple of weeks later, there is another mass emailing that also mentions he wants to hear form customers on the bottom.

I guess it arrived on the right day,as I found myself in the mood and with the time to compose a response. So I did – and I really didn’t pull any punches.

I expected to hear nothing further, when I receive an email asking for a phone number to contact me. I reply with my cell number and expect a polite call from some customer support manager, warm words of sympathy, and thing else.

Not so, I get a call from Tom Buiocchi, the CEO of Drobo. He apologizes for my experience and asks how they can fix it. After explaining that I didn’t write the email to do anything other then tell him what happened, we tossed around a few ideas and he decided to send me a Drobo Pro to use and decide if I thought Drobo was a reliable product.

I’ve been running this unit since then and it has proven to be rock solid in reliability. I’m not sure what happened with my failing units (I believe they are taking them apart to discover for themselves), but my current unit is stable and has restored my faith in the product. The actions of Tom Buiocchi has also restored my faith in the company. Drobo takes customer support seriously.

I’m impressed.

Why Apple?

Well, certainly a lot of comments about moving from Windows to Mac. It seems to be an area of strong options and even an emotional subject. For myself, I view it as a business decision and try to approach these things from a rational and longer term perspective. With that in mind, I thought it might be useful to walk through my particular situation along decision process and conclusions.

The situation

First, I am a professional photographer with a large (and growing) library of work. My system is required both support existing work and to process new work as its created. I also need to support all aspects of my business environment, from communicating with clients, business paperwork, to supporting my marketing efforts and even dealing with my website.This measn that my system is critical to my success and difficulties with my environment can put my projects, clients, and income at risk. It’s simply unacceptable for my environment to be unavailable for any significant period of time, day evenings or weekends.

As well, I am not interested in spending singificant time administering or maintaining my system.

What I have now

Currently a 4-core AMD platform, runnng Windows XP Sp3 with DROBO and G-Technology external disks, a 23″ Lacie monitor and (roughly) 10 TB of online storage. I primarily use MS-office, photoshop, lightroom and various other business applications.

The problem

I have enough processing power and storage for my needs, but the 4GB limits to windows XP is causing me pain.

The real pain is in system reliability issues.

I had a series of system problems about a year ago that really caused a lot of problems. A failing power supply took out a lot of my internal components until it was finally found to be the problem. In fact it dramtically took out the test took at my local Tiger direct – quite literally exploding it.

This seemed to have solved the problem, but I have since had a series of annoying, but significant issues.

• My firewire ports have stopped working, both on the motherboard and an external card.
• My system gives out beeping warning messages under heavy graphics load (lightroom or photoshop) and while rebooting.
• The system will crash unexpectedly and with little warning every couple of months or so.
• The system will often fail to reboot from either a clean or hard shutdown.

I appear to have a thermal issue, as my rebooting problem will go away if I give the system time to cool down. If I leave it overnight, it will reboot with no problem at all. However, I have had it fail during critical client jobs and actually  pulled the cover and used it like a fan to desperately cool the unit enough to reboot. I felt like some kind of high tech egyption slave. It was rather funny, had the situation not been so urgent.

I’ve also had a half dozen USB components fail or not function correctly. Either the plug and play fails or the device can’t be found or otherwise fails to function. This is the most frustrating problem. Sometimes, I’ve discovered it’s a cheap component in a othersie nice case or simply my unit, as it works on another system with no problem.

Why Change?

Strangely enough, it was the purchase of some new external storage that pushed me over the edge.

I’ve reached the point that I do not want to go through another repair cycle with the existing unit and will simply replace the whole thing. I tried the repair cycle awhile ago and that did not completely fix the problem. I am also not prepared to invest a signifcant amount of time testing individual components to find the ones to keep and the ones to replace. It’s time for replace the whole thing and be done with it. I’m paid to create photographs, not fix PCs.

I’ve been running Windows XP for some time and even purchased a few copies during various Microsoft end of life announcements. Vista looked like a bag of problems and no benefit, so we skipped that upgrade. Unfortunately, Microsoft has decided to punish clients who failed to upgrade and offers NO upgrade path to move from XP to windows 7.

Based on a recommendation from Chase Jarvis, I purchased an G-safe external drive with two raid 0 1TB drives. It’s certainly not the cheapest drive unit out there, but it’s still reasonably priced. It’s very well built, highly respected , and well worth the money. This is a quality piece of equipment.

It was the quality of the product that got me thinking about the quality of my computing environment. Most of my problems seem to relate to the quality of the equipment used and It’s also quality that I sell to my clients. I invest significant sums in quality photographic tools, but had missed the boat with my computing environment.

Perhaps missed the boat is the wrong definition. In my opinion, the PC market has moved downstream to low margin, high volume products with a increasingly limited investment in quality control.

The Apple buying experience

Obviously, as a photographer, I have been hearing from Apple users about their experiences for some time. I ad decided some time ago that upon the retirement of my current system I would review my choice of platforms.

So, I started surfing the apple site to find out more about the products. I also happily discovered that my ASMP membership had a benefit of discounts on Apple equipment. Since I am in Canada, it’s wasn’t clear if I could access the discount, so I decided to phone them with a few questions. Not only did they happily spend over 45 minutes on the phone with  my endless stupid questions, Greg (the Apple representative) also understood the requirements of a professional photographer and often anticipated my questions. We even explored a lower end system to see if it might meet my needs for less money. He also recommended several third party vendors for some components, along with simplifying my configuration.

As soon as he found out I was in Canada, every price was in Canadian dollars. This one of the only times I have spoken to a US vendor without doing currency conversions in my head.

The decision

I came to the conclusion that my applications are the most important tools. Lightroom, MS-office (or iWork), Photoshop, and my business apps are all available on the Mac. Most of them allow me to transfer the license and download the new version over the net.

Leaving XP for Windows 7 requires the same amount of work, if not more, than moving to Mac and I fear Windows 7 is just a fancy release of Windows Vista with some of the bugs fixed (and new ones added). I also suspect buying another windows platform is just going to give me more grief from cheaply made components.

The Mac OS is basically an implementation of the mature (and stable) Unix operationg system with a sophisticated graphical interface.

So…..I decided to take the plunge.

Now, I am not a half way kind of person, nor do I plan for the short term. If my plan is on track. I will have quality equipment that will last a long time. I expect to move into less critical roles, but avoid the forklift upgrades of the PC world.

So I ordered the MAC Pro with dual 4-core Nehelam chips and 16GB of memory. I can go to a max of 32GB, but this is the limit of the memory chips available, not the OS.The memory DIMMS for 32GB were quite expensive, so I opted for 16GB and a future upgrade in the distant future. I went for the dual CPUs to retain the option of perhaps moving into video.

I can run my 4GB Windows system as a virtual machine, if I want and still have plenty of memory.

I went with the 30″ apple monitor, as I have been hearing rave review about this monitor for some time. I’ll still use my old monitor, but I’m moving to a dual configuration. I’ve really started to see the benefits of increased monitor real estate.

I’ve also ordered a Mac Air laptop, as I need to be able to get mobile. I’m still unsure if the Mac Pro laptop might have been a better choice, but the Air is significantly lighter.

So now I await the equipment arrival and hope the old system holds together for the migration.

…more to come…