Drobo Ineffective and tedious product support if you can call it support. Sunnyvale CA

Several years ago I bought a Drobo which worked well on my iMac and then failed.  I have no issue with that as it had saved my data twice and had served me as long as should be expected.  There was a little difficulty in getting it to work with my iMac but phone technical support was available and solved the problem quickly.

I bought a new Drobo 5C to replace the old one.  I kept getting a popup on my iMac informing me that Time Machine couldn't be backed up.  With a company that cared with decent product support, there would have been a phone number to call and the problem would have been solved shortly.  Drobo no longer has a phone number to call; not even a chat room.  Product support is via email.  The alleged "support" email comes once a day or maybe twice a day if you're lucky and has various suggestions which turned out not to solve the problem.  Some of those were:

1.  Send us a diagnostic file.  The way to send a diagnostic file was not intuitive but was eventually done.

2.  The recommendation after the diagnostic file was sent was to "flip the cable" attached to the Drobo by 180 degrees as it was connected at "2.0 speeds."  I duely flipped the cable which did nothing to solve the problem.

3.  Somehow in my trying various things, in the absence of effective product support, I managed to get two "volumes" of backup on the Drobo.  Keep in mind my request for product support started on June 8th and it's now June 24th.  The two volumes meant that twice the space was being taken up on the Drobo than there should have been.  I was told via another email that in order to rectify the situation, I would have to reset the Drobo which I did.  There was no way to remove just one volume; I had to delete both volumes and reformat the drives.  If way back in early June effective product support had been given, it never would have come to this.  I did manage to get the Drobo working properly with a little thanks to them and a lot of thanks to me.

4.  My last email from "William P" arrived on June 25th (the day after I got the Drobo working).  Apparently it's OK from them to know my name but not for me to know theirs.  Some of the advice was, try closing and relaunching the dashboard (already done several times with no success), try rebooting the computer (already done with no success), will the Drobo connect if no drives are installed (Really, I'm supposed to remove the drives from the Drobo?  I want it to work with the drives in place.), please disconnect and reconnect the data cable at both ends (it NEVER was a problem the the cable connection), try a different cable (Really?  It's a new cable that put TWO volumes on the Drobo with no problem.), try a different port on the computer (the port has been working fine).

Hopefully my new Drobo will work for a long time because I would hate to deal with their product support again.