I received an email today from Drobo Support, and what was kind of scary was that the engineer had found my blog and read what i had done over the weekend. At the same time it was also kind of reassuring to know that I was dealing with someone that was tech savvy and Internet aware, not always the case these days unfortunately.

Now in all fairness I probably didn’t help myself with my impatience but in my own defence I wasn’t really expecting Drobo’s support to come through for me. Why? For absolutely no good reason if I am honest other than my experience with other companies support organisations. Something that I may come to regret! Anyway by deleting and recreating the volume I had removed the problem so there wasn’t anything to troubleshoot, although that said I feel that I have proved something to myself, I am just not sure quite what yet! However, the Drobo support engineer did quite honestly state that they have had a few customers with similar problems that seemed to be down to insufficient power from the power supply when used with the splitter and the DroboShare. What more the engineer asked for my mailing address so they could send me another power supply.

Now to me, this is the first sign of good customer support! There has been none of the “you must be doing something wrong”, there has been none of the “do you know what you are doing?”, in fact thus far every email has been polite and to the point with useful steps to try and a general willingness to get to the root of the problem, even given the fact that I obviously have the patience of a rattle snake being poked with a sharp stick What’s more the Drobo engineer even conceded that if we couldn’t get to the root of the problem, they would probably need to swap out the unit.

The best bit is that a no point has the sordid detail of money been mentioned! All of this together makes me want to work with them until I can understand the root cause of the problem, opposed to just swapping the device out and being left doubting the product.

So far I am happy! Now don’t misunderstand me I am not happy that the problem happened in the first place, but we are dealing with mechanical devices here and they do break. Hell that’s what I brought a device that amongst other things sells itself on it fault tolerant capabilities. What I am happy about is so far the response has been, bar the no weekend coverage, in line with what I would honestly expect from a professional organisation.

However I am not sold yet so will be copying my data back to the Drobo only after soak testing it until the new power supply turns up. Even then I will be backing it up several times a day before trusting it 100% with my data, and before purchasing another unit.