Multithreaded

I just bought a Drobo to make use of a bunch of old drives I have lying around. I’m a big fan of redundant storage systems but my recent experiences of using an Apple RAID card in my MacPro have been less than satisfactory. The performance was not as good as I’d expected, it takes ages for raid arrays to initialize and I was getting a lot of problems with the system not coming out of sleep so I decided to ditch that.

I ordered the Drobo from Expansys on Thursday and it arrived on Monday. Today I pulled it out of the box and set it up. Firstly, the unboxing is quite a nice experience in itself, comparable to opening an Apple product. The all-black interior of the box, complete with black foam and a good quality black fabric bag on the Drobo itself, all lend an air of quality to the experience. There is a bit, three-step, getting started guide on the cardboard cover and all the cables and accessories are laid out in a separate tray.

So what of the device itself? The unit is smaller than I was expecting, just large enough to take four drives. It has nicely rounded corners and a very solid feel without beeing excessively heave. The front panel is held on by magnets and is removed with a gentle pull to reveal the drive slots. These have spring-loaded flaps on them and inserting drives is simply a matter of sliding them in until they click under the restraining clips. The Drobo takes any combination of SATA1 and SATA2 3.5″ drives. I put in a 750G, two 500Gs and a 250G.

The Resource CD has tools for both OS X and Windows. I was installing on a Mac which was just a matter of running the installer program for the Drobo Dashboard. The Dashboard provides several useful views of the device configuration from the overview:

to the more detailed status:

Following installation, the software offered to upgrade itself to the latest version, which it did with no fuss. Then it asked me to plug in the Drobo USB cable and it set it all up automatically, only pausing to ask if I wanted FAT or Mac OS Extended format. Within about two minutes I was up and running with 1.1TB of free space, all fully redundant spread across the 2TB of drives (1.8TB actually usable). This is far more impressive than the half-hour or more it usually takes to fully initialize a RAID array.

All in all, I’m very impressed with the device and the setup. The next test is how well it performs. Clearly the USB 2.0 connection will be a limiting factor here, but I’ll keep an eye on it to see how it goes.

Update:
Mind you, given this announcement, perhaps my timing for buying one was not so great.

Well, Orange have finally agreed to close down my broadband account, 3 and a half months after installing it. At no time was the service fit for purpose. At best, I would get several line drops an hour with an immediate reconnect, at worst no service at all. From the morning of December 23rd until now I have had no connection at all.

I finally managed to persuade technical support that raising another line test request was not going to be worth it. They tried to tell me that they couldn’t raise a cancellation authorization as no line test had been done in December. I politely pointed out that the reason no line test had been done in December was because it had taken their engineers four and a half weeks to respond to the fault which was raised at the end of November. Eventually, after consulting his supervisor, the support guy, who really was very helpful and stayed calm despite my ranting, told me that he would raise a cancellation authorization. However, his system was down which meant he couldn’t do it there and then but he promised that he would put in all the details and that I should give customer services a call an hour and a half later to complete the cancellation.

Actually, I waited until the next day as 40 minutes on the line with Orange was all I could stand that day. When I did call, much to my surprise, the cancellation authorization was there on my accounts records and a very chirpy young lady agreed to start processing it. Too good to be true, however. When she contacted Customer Care (the Orange department naming committee clearly have a strong sense of irony) they told her that they would not process the cancellation since “not enough diagnostics had been carried out and they needed to send me a new modem”. She argued my case, even consulting the official procedures manual and pointing out to them the bit which said that if tech support had raised the authorization then they had no choice. Customer Care responded that they could override the cancellation if not enough diagnostics had been done. She took the matter up with her supervisor who insisted that CC could not refuse to cancel and even spoke to them directly whilst I held to clear the matter up and finally came back to me to say that Customer Care had agreed to do the cancellation and that he would clear the outstanding balance on my account (I cancelled my direct debit last month) and that if I had any problem I could contact him personally.

So finally I seem to be free of the abomination that is Orange Broadband. There’s something I don’t understand, though. Why would a company treat its customers like this? What do they possibly hope to gain by subjecting them to atrocious levels of service, making them hold for 15 minutes or more in order to speak to people who have no control over the situation; holding customers to the letter of a contract when it is clear that the service is not working; continuing to take money from people when they are not providing a working service with the threat of legal action if they default.

Even had Orange sorted out the problems and got me a working service, I would have terminated it at the end of the contract anyway. I have been an Orange mobile phone customer for over a decade, which is why I signed up for their broadband in the first place, but now I want nothing to do with them. I am actively seeking another provider for my £250-£300 per month business mobile phone services. In other words, because of so doggedly trying to hold on to £20 per month of broadband income they have alienated a loyal customer so much that they are going to lose more than 10 times that revenue in another area of their business.

If Orange do not sort out this situation quickly I think they do not have a very bright future. Somehow, though, I don’t see them getting it sorted. The automated switchboard message had changed when I called yesterday. It said that it was taking 8 to 10 days longer than usual to send out new live boxes because of the extra large number of sign-ups they were dealing with. All I could think of was poor sods who are going to have to go through what I did.

Can anyone recommend a good mobile phone provider in the UK?

Update Jan 4th: Finally managed to get my account cancelled after a two-day saga.

If you are considering having Orange Broadband installed then think again. I had my Broadband Max, or whatever it is called, installed in mid-September and am still trying to get a decent service from them.

For the first month the line would not connect at all. To be fair, this was a fault on the BT line which also meant that voice calls were very noisy. When we contacted BT about it they said they couldn’t find a fault and that they could send an engineer out to us but if it turned out the problem was with our equipment then they would charge us for the visit. Nice company that threatens their customers with financial penalties for reporting problems. Still, this rant post is about Orange, not BT. Orange technical support requested a line test which, indeed, came back saying there was a potential problem on the line and, lo and behold, an engineer cleaned some contacts at the exchange and the noise on the voice calls is now gone.

That, however, was the last favour that Orange did me. Since then I have had a broadband connection which drops regularly. I’ve never seen it stay up for more than two hours and it often drops within a few minutes to half an hour. Sometimes it reconnects within a few minutes, but often it will stay down for an hour or two, cycling around making a connection and then dropping again after a few seconds.

I have spent upwards of 10 hours on the phone to Orange technical support in the past two months going around the same loop. They put in a request for a line test and ask me to call back in a couple of days to get the result, since they cannot seem to progress a problem without prompting. The result is always the same - a possible fault on the line. Please call back in 72 hours to get an update. Engineers believe the fault is fixed but the line is still dropping in the same intermittent fashion. Request a line test… - I’m now on the fourth iteration of this loop.

On Monday I decided I had had enough and asked for my account to be cancelled and for a refund. After having technical support tell me that they couldn’t do anything and I should speak to customer services, and customer services tell me that they couldn’t do anything and I should speak to technical support, I finally got escalated to escalations who cannot do anything as I am in a twelve month contract and because the line is up sometimes they won’t let me cancel as there is hope the problem can be corrected.

Now here’s the real kicker. Because the engineers have not made an appointment to visit my house and look at the line at that end, Orange consider that not all the possible diagnostics have been done and until all possible diagnostics have been done I cannot cancel. However, it it up to the engineers to decide if they think they need to make and appointment to visit my house and they currently don’t believe it is necessary. That means that I am entirely at Orange’s mercy to be able to cancel this service which does not work.

In addition, the engineers are not under any obligation to respond in any definite time-scale to get a problem resolved which is why, although the last request for them to look at it was on September 27th, I am still waiting for any kind of update from them a week later. As usual, the best that customer support can do is to ask me to call back again, on their national-rate number, in 24 hours to check for an update as they are incapable of calling me back when anything changes.

Apparently the engineers are quite busy at the moment which is why it is taking so long for them to get around to my fault (again). My understanding is that they are so busy because thousands of Orange LLU customers are suffering similar or other problems.

The frustrating thing is that when the line is up it is actually very fast. In the meantime I am still using my Easynet business broadband line which, though very expensive and only 2Mbps (only? three years ago that was a miracle!), has been down for a total of about 1 hour in all the years I’ve had it.

The whole experience has been so frustrating that I am considering moving my business mobile phone account to another provider in protest - if only I could find one that was any good. It is interesting that competition in the telecoms markets has simply resulted in price wars with no-one competing on quality of service.

Just in case the message wasn’t clear, don’t get Orange broadband.