...Not to mention a firmware update that bricked 1.6TB of my data, in a completely unrecoverable way. I was running a Drobo v2 with v.1.31 and had rebooted it hundreds of times in the last 2 years. There was a new firmware update that claimed to fix some performance issues. I upgraded the firmware (using the approved Windows method).
The device never booted again. It's been bricked for months now, and my data, while still striped across the platters, is held hostage by the Drobo device. Downgrading the firmware isn't possible, because the moment the firmware is updated (before the initial reboot of the device), the disk pack itself is upgrade to that same firmware revision.
There is no going back... and DRI openly states that I'm screwed, and there's nothing they can do. They can't even give me the "Last Resort Firmware" that they hand out in cases just like this. I've opened plenty of cases with them about it, and their response is "Sorry, you should have had your data on another Drobo as a backup."
I will never use a proprietary, black-box data storage solution again, ever.
10 years of digital photos, dozens of system backups, thousands of scanned documents long since gone, my entire music collection, etc. all stored on a device that claimed to be completely safe to store it.
Avoid Drobo at all costs, if you care about your data.