William Gallagher
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.
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24 Comments
Starcentric was having issues with the Drobo line long before coronavirus
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
Leo on MacBreak Weekly touted them for years. Wonder if he will comment on next show.
Drivers are an issue now.
The DROBO devices have some really nice features.
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.