I saw your post and I’d like to take a moment and respond to the issues you raise here. I am a product marketing manager at Data Robotics and we’re sorry you’re having difficulties with your Drobo, and I’d like to assure you that our support organization is there to help out. Please give them a call at 1-866-426-4280, they will do their best to help you resolve your rebuild time issue.

As you mentioned in your post, you are using the original USB 2.0 Drobo connected to your host. Since the release of that product in 2007 we have come out with two additional products; Drobo 2nd Generation and the DroboPro each product has substantial performance improvements over the original 1st generation product. To help the throughput issue, both the DroboPro and Drobo 2nd generation support Firewire 800/400 in addition to the slower USB 2.0 connection. The DroboPro also supports a Gigabit iSCSI connection to the host which is much faster than USB, as well as Firewire 800. With the addition of Firewire 800 and iSCSI to the product line you should see substantial speed improvements over the USB 2.0 interface found on the original Drobo product.

One of the key engineering tenants for Data Robotics is to make our storage products simple to setup and manage. Along those lines we’ve developed the BeyondRAID technology that you mention in your entry. BeyondRAID blends the goodness from older traditional RAID into a single self-healing, self-managing system. With BeyondRAID, you have the best of RAID 1, 5, 6 without the limitations of those RAID levels. Your rebuild time issue notwithstanding, BeyondRAID technology is fast and efficient as well as extremely easy to manage. This is what the majority of our customer base demands.

As I’m sure you are aware, with many computer systems and accessories there are regular software upgrades for products once the initial products are released. Rest assured we at Data Robotics, Inc. continually strive to solve issues as they arise and update features with our firmware and the Drobo Dashboard software. As a Drobo customer the updates to your Drobo firmware and Drobo Dashboard software are *FREE* to download at any time. There is no need to have an extended service contract with us to do this. All you need to do is to select the “Check for updates” option in your Drobo Dashboard software, and the latest firmware and dashboard software will be downloaded automatically. Also, you also have complete free access to our knowledge base and of course all the other materials on our website at http://www.drobo.com. The additional service contract extension you mention in your post is for our on-call support line. As a registered customer of Data Robotics with an out of warranty product, you can extend your call-in privileges by purchasing a $129.00 contract extension. This price is valid for everyone until December 31, 2009.

Also, soon Drobo Dashboard will be updated to support the 64-bit Mac OS X 10.6 aka Snow Leopard, and should be available by the end of 2009. As a Drobo customer, this update will be a *FREE* download at http://www.drobo.com.

As we all know, disk drives will eventually fail. One of the key features built into every Data Robotics storage product is to manage drive failures as gracefully and efficiently as possible. The data protection scheme BeyondRAID offers, including the self-healing capabilities, are always striving keep your data safe upon a drive failure. In your case, it seems the restructuring process seems to be taking longer than normal and there can be a few causes to this. First may be you’re actively accessing your data by data while the rebuild is in progress. This will extend the rebuild times because accessing your data and rebuilding the failed drive simultaneously are competing for CPU time on the Drobo causing each to take more time than normal. Be assured that if you stop copying your data off the Drobo then the rebuild time will recover to normal levels. Further, updated firmware will help reduce the rebuild times once the immediate rebuild process that is running completes. More recent products have increased CPU power and, therefore, decreased rebuild times upon a drive failure.

Another factor could be the error handling quality of the surviving drives themselves. Your Drobo will work with any SATA I or II drives, but some drives are better than others. I’m not sure which drives you are using in your Drobo but, given the age of your Drobo, it may be the case that drives you are using are very old and don’t handle errors very efficiently. Newer, more modern disk drives may help the situation.

Computing technology continues to evolve and improve with faster process and better technologies. I believe it’s unfair to judge a technology that you haven’t upgraded when all the other technology that surrounds it has probably been improved.

In that light I would like to make you and your readers aware of our customer upgrade program. For registered owners of an original Drobo you can get a $50 off discount on the purchase of a new Drobo 2nd Generation or $200 off the purchase of a DroboPro. To take advantage of this discount, customers need only call our sales line in the US at 1-866.997.6268 or email sales@drobo.com to get your upgrade coupon.