Storage firm Drobo has filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy
Longstanding Thunderbolt and network-attached storage company Drobo filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy in late June, and will hold its first creditors meeting on July 17.
First formed as Data Robotics in 2005, Drobo manufactured solutions for remote and network storage. Parent company StarCentric filed bankrupcy papers with the California Northern Bankruptcy Court (San Jose) on June 20, 2022.
According to official court documentation, the company is to hold its first creditors meeting on July 19. There is also a final deadline for filing claims against the company, which is October 17, 2022.
The company has no commented publicly on the decision. However, the company appears to have been badly affected by the coronavirus. In February 2020, the company tweeted about production delays, and in March 2020, its CEO Mihir Shah addressed concerns over how the coronavirus would affect the company.
"We are in close contact with all of our suppliers and we are trying to mitigate the impact of any delay in the supply chain," he wrote in a blog post.
There have been no further blog posts since then. Drobo Support hasn't tweeted for over a year, and Drobo's main Twitter account has been silent since December 2021.
The company does also not appear to have made any announcements about Apple Silicon support since November 2020.
However, a Reddit user reports that Drobo Support has said the company is not closing.
"The restructuring process will enable us to continue servicing our customers and partners and make the necessary investments to achieve our strategic objectives," the Reddit user quotes. "StorCentric concluded that the voluntary Ch 11 reorganization is the best way to fix our balance sheet and we will remain fully functional during the restructuring process."
Drobo's online US and European stores are currently both showing every product as sold out.
The Chapter 11 filing implies that the company is trying to reorganize and return to full operations at some point. It isn't yet clear what the reorganization will look like, nor the magnitude of the creditors' demands.
Read on AppleInsider
First formed as Data Robotics in 2005, Drobo manufactured solutions for remote and network storage. Parent company StarCentric filed bankrupcy papers with the California Northern Bankruptcy Court (San Jose) on June 20, 2022.
According to official court documentation, the company is to hold its first creditors meeting on July 19. There is also a final deadline for filing claims against the company, which is October 17, 2022.
The company has no commented publicly on the decision. However, the company appears to have been badly affected by the coronavirus. In February 2020, the company tweeted about production delays, and in March 2020, its CEO Mihir Shah addressed concerns over how the coronavirus would affect the company.
"We are in close contact with all of our suppliers and we are trying to mitigate the impact of any delay in the supply chain," he wrote in a blog post.
There have been no further blog posts since then. Drobo Support hasn't tweeted for over a year, and Drobo's main Twitter account has been silent since December 2021.
The company does also not appear to have made any announcements about Apple Silicon support since November 2020.
However, a Reddit user reports that Drobo Support has said the company is not closing.
"The restructuring process will enable us to continue servicing our customers and partners and make the necessary investments to achieve our strategic objectives," the Reddit user quotes. "StorCentric concluded that the voluntary Ch 11 reorganization is the best way to fix our balance sheet and we will remain fully functional during the restructuring process."
Drobo's online US and European stores are currently both showing every product as sold out.
The Chapter 11 filing implies that the company is trying to reorganize and return to full operations at some point. It isn't yet clear what the reorganization will look like, nor the magnitude of the creditors' demands.
Read on AppleInsider
Comments
There has been little innovation in product line for years now. They reduced the product line to just four products none of which were especially competitive against the likes of Synology
I have the 8D which was discontinued as part of the product cull. It's a good direct attached solution. Performance is just about OK… and that was/is the problem with BeyondRAID. Average performance and zero ways to recover data should a unit fail other than to an identical device which was prematurely discontinued and unavailable
I'm sorry to see them go but it was long overdue. I suspect this is the end and Chapter 11 is not going to save them
Stuart
Originally, I had three 4 TB drives in my Drobo. As my storage needs have increased, drive prices have come down, I have migrated drives to my current config of five 8TB drives.
You can configure a DROBO for single or dual drive redundancy. If a drive fails, and you have enough free space on the remaining drives, it will move data around to regain redundancy. Suppose you have five 5TB drives configured for single drive redundancy. That gives you 20TB of useable space. Suppose you are only using 10TB of that. Further suppose that just after you leave on Friday night, one of the drives dies. By the time you get back on Monday morning, the DROBO would have automatically reconfigured itself as a four drive system with 15TB of useable space. On Monday when you get in, just pop out the dead drive and slide in a new drive, and the DROBO will start using it. If, on Monday, a second drive fails before you have replaced the first failed drive, you won't lose any data as the system had already configured itself as a four drive system with redundancy.
It would be a shame for DROBO to go away. Their products are very easy to use.
Drobo had a nice little niche of mainly DAS drives with Thunderbolt connectivity (and before that Firewire 800 & USB) that appealed to photographers and videographers. The in-place upgradeability was a godsend to prosumers like myself who needed to spread out the cost of buying larger hard drives over time.
But NAS competitors ate away at their business on the top end and things like the Thunderbay series with SoftRAID from long time Mac supplier OWC proved to be too much. Honestly, I was surprised to see a software update for M1 Macs released last year even though it still runs in Rosetta. And macOS complains about the driver type so I suspect it will be deprecated from macOS compatibility in the future if nothing is done and I'm not getting my hopes up on seeing an update. And since you haven't been able to buy new Drobo hardware in nearly 2 years, I was wondering why Chapter 11 hadn't happened sooner. You can't live in existing support contracts forever.
The 5D3 was also an early Thunderbolt 3 device and as a result, it's a little weird in compatibility and I've found that hooking it into a Thunderbolt hub helps. I had planned on using it as part of my backup strategy and I still might. But I'm thinking it can't hold any data that is mission critical for me.
Different generations.
1 is dead.
The other 2 are working.
I had to go to something more stable- the OWC Thunderbay with Softraid.
The company, the support, all died before Covid.
The marketing was sub-par.
I'll be sad to see them go- but, if they think they are going to come out of bankruptcy- and get people to believe in them again- they have so much reputation management that needs to happen. Lying about supply chain issues- or repairs- doesn't build customer confidence.
They were out of stock even in 2019 before COVID lockdowns and supply chain disruptions happened. That was just a convenient excuse. In other words, they lied.
I've had 3 Drobo's (5D, 5N and 8D), all worked fine, sold the 5D, but still use 8D (8x12TB+1TB SSD cache), 5N (5x6TB). Gradually upgraded over the years, only had to rebuild the 5D array one time, and recovered from separate network backup fine. Ease of use and replacing failed drives, upgrades, all very easy.
Yet, like others here could see the writing on the wall, no innovation, and while BeyondRAID is undoubtedly clever, felt that the hardware just never kept up. Performance as mentioned elsewhere, was only ever average.
Will have to make sure to keep the 8D/Mac-mini on current OS, until I can work out my replacement choices.
I had support contracts and had 4 or 5 calls over the years, always responded to quickly and detailed solutions. Maybe I was lucky on that.
Unsettling news. I have had a Drobo 5D since about 2015 and later I added a Mini to back it up. The 5D has worked trouble free (Mini not so). Drobo suited me as a prosumer hobby photographer. The simple plug-n-play Mac software vibe is a pleasure to use. Interesting thing about RAID boxes, they aren’t that cheap to upgrade—as I found out when I upsized from all-1TB drives in the five bays, to 2TB, and finally 4TB HDDs. As I use dual drive redundancy, I needed to buy three larger HDDS to see an increase in storage size when upsizing. I’ve upsized three times over the years, plus I’ve had to replace faulty HDDs (easy peasy). That’s a lot of HDDs over the years, maybe 20, in one box… and costly too. Thanks to Drobo my storage kept pace with my expanding photo library. Still, maybe it’s time to commit to online storage like Backblaze, let them worry about sourcing HDDs.
Correction: I think I bought the Drobo 5D nearly ten years ago. It had just been released at the time. Wow! It has served me well!