begin rant
Drobo is a great idea. On paper. It’s a small simple RAID (redundant array of independent disks) solution for information storage. Gale won one in a competition a few years back. It has multiple hard drives that mirror each other. So as you put files on one drive, they are copied to the other. This has the HUGE benefit that if one drive should fail, then you just pop out the bad drive, insert a new one and keep working without any loss. The downside is, as we have found out multiple times now, is that if the Drobo itself fails then you have lost both drives.
Which means that Gale now has two 1terabyte hard drives with information we can’t access. Obviously the warranty has expired and the replacement power supply (which I suspect is the problem) is $60. I’m unsure what to do next. Luckily, kinda, this is the second time it has failed, so she had copies of pretty much all the important stuff. Oh, and the other thing, the drives are formatted in such a way that only a Drobo can read them, so I can’t just plug it into a computer and copy everything over.
/rant
Update: They just emailed me back. Which was very quick. The tech thinks i’m right. He suggested things I already tried and then suggest I buy the out of warranty plan for the replacement. $269 please…