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See note at bottom for update to the story here. Drobo CO did come through and get our data restored. I am impressed by that. **************************************** I will revise this review later if story turns out to be anything other than what it now appears to be. We use a Drobo as main disk array for Apple Mac that we use for video editing. Everything has worked fine for about 6 months. We have Drobo loaded with 4 WD 1,000GB drives. Everything is top notch equipment, with very strong surge protection and uninterruptable power supply, top of the line Apple computer. Okay, that's background. The other day, Drobo stopped booting correctly. Called Drobo, and they nicely sent us another unit. Same problem. Now they are saying to run certain software to further diagnose. Problem is that drives have to be recognized of course to run that software. It appears at present that something catastrophic happened in the Drobo unit that caused all four of these new 1,000GB WD drives to fail at the same time. We are now investigating which company to send them to in order to try to get the data off of the platters themselves. Once we have our data back, if we ever have our data back, and we buy new drives, what are the odds that they are going back into a Drobo unit? We will now spend hundreds of dollars to try to recover what we can at the platter level. The Drobo techs have been nice enough, but they act like this is some problem of ours other than a major failure of their device. Which I guess means it IS a problem of ours, to fix. Update number one: There will be more. We had our computer tech expert come over and check everything that we have checked and that the Drobo techs had us check. He concluded there is nothing for it but that the drives are indeed now ALL dead and we have now sent the drives off to the experts in town that recover files from platters. I'll let you all know how that works out. Unbelievable. Update number two: Got assessment back from recovery company. The drives are all dead. It will cost us $ 8,000.00 to get our data back off of the platters. (That is, of course, on top of the costs of four dead 1 Terabyte WD drives and a Drobo unit we'll never trust again. Nor any replacement, frankly.) We are not sure yet what we will do. Drobo has indicated they may try to do something for us. I'll let you know if they do. (or don't) Update number three (a couple weeks into this): Nothing really happened since update two except that we are working through our best options for recovering or reproducing the information we lost on the drives. Update number four: Drobo has offered to check our platters for us and see if they can recover our data. The independent company's bid for $ 8,000.00 is partly that high because of the proprietary RAID algorithm that Drobo uses (would have been a lower cost bid if it was more industry standard). Maybe Drobo can recover the data more efficiently since they will better understand their own RAID design. I'll keep you posted from here! Update number five: We received the unit back from Drobo today. They got it all working again and we have all our data back. I am impressed that they were able to do this and that they were willing to do this. I wish they had suggested this option from the git go because it would have saved a lot of time and other efforts by our team. But, they really did come through in getting this done for us. I have not talked enough with our team person in charge of this to know if Drobo was able to diagnose what happened but I do know it's working now and we have the data back.