Chris Kenny
Well-known member
So, last week we took delivery on an external SATA enclosure and controller card from CoolDrives. We installed the card in a G5, hooked up the enclosure, installed the drives, created a couple of striped disk sets, and started copying data to it.
Over the last week with this thing, we've had drives randomly unmounting, drives operating extremely slowly (under a meg a second), and freezes during large file copies. CoolDrives casually mentioned in response to the first set of such issues that the enclosure wasn't compatible with the drives we were using, which were common Seagate drives. The sales material made no mention of such incompatibilities, and in fact identified the enclosure as "Full SATA compatible".
After investing about 30 hours trying to get this thing to work, and trying three different kinds of drives, we asked for a refund. CoolDrives is trying to enforce a no-refund policy against a product that was falsely represented. And we're not interested in going back and forth with CoolDrives, having the product shipped back and forth (at our expense, of course), only to end up with storage we can't trust. Plus, some Google searches reveal that they've apparently done this to others (wish I'd done some research before ordering), and that other people have shipped back clearly defective products only to be told nothing is wrong and to have the products shipped back to them.
About five minutes after we requested the refund, we got a call from CoolDrives. During the course of the conversation, I was accused of being a scam artist and threatened with legal action if I disputed the charge. ("Do you know what we do to customers who do that?") The rep constantly talked over me, denied that the problem could be their product, and tried to claim the almost universal bad reviews of their company were the result of a just handful of 400K customers (which they can't possibly have).
Also, after telling me via e-mail that they knew of incompatibilities with some drives, the rep tried to deny this over the phone, claiming the problem must be shoddy or defective hard drives. (We've tried drives from Maxtor, Seagate and Western Digital, all of which work perfectly when not installed in the CoolDrives enclosure.)
Anyway, I am disputing the charge, and will be posting more about this here and on the Indie4K blog. The whole experience has been downright surreal.
If you're looking for low-cost external commodity storage, look as far away from CoolDrives as possible. And be aware that they also operate under about a dozen other names. (USBGear, SATAGear, etc.)
Over the last week with this thing, we've had drives randomly unmounting, drives operating extremely slowly (under a meg a second), and freezes during large file copies. CoolDrives casually mentioned in response to the first set of such issues that the enclosure wasn't compatible with the drives we were using, which were common Seagate drives. The sales material made no mention of such incompatibilities, and in fact identified the enclosure as "Full SATA compatible".
After investing about 30 hours trying to get this thing to work, and trying three different kinds of drives, we asked for a refund. CoolDrives is trying to enforce a no-refund policy against a product that was falsely represented. And we're not interested in going back and forth with CoolDrives, having the product shipped back and forth (at our expense, of course), only to end up with storage we can't trust. Plus, some Google searches reveal that they've apparently done this to others (wish I'd done some research before ordering), and that other people have shipped back clearly defective products only to be told nothing is wrong and to have the products shipped back to them.
About five minutes after we requested the refund, we got a call from CoolDrives. During the course of the conversation, I was accused of being a scam artist and threatened with legal action if I disputed the charge. ("Do you know what we do to customers who do that?") The rep constantly talked over me, denied that the problem could be their product, and tried to claim the almost universal bad reviews of their company were the result of a just handful of 400K customers (which they can't possibly have).
Also, after telling me via e-mail that they knew of incompatibilities with some drives, the rep tried to deny this over the phone, claiming the problem must be shoddy or defective hard drives. (We've tried drives from Maxtor, Seagate and Western Digital, all of which work perfectly when not installed in the CoolDrives enclosure.)
Anyway, I am disputing the charge, and will be posting more about this here and on the Indie4K blog. The whole experience has been downright surreal.
If you're looking for low-cost external commodity storage, look as far away from CoolDrives as possible. And be aware that they also operate under about a dozen other names. (USBGear, SATAGear, etc.)
