"This site is as good as its website, Confusing, ugly , and dumb. I ordered on the 15th and recived an email it would be shiped between 2 and 24 hours, great i say, the next day i cant check my order status so i ring them up and they say it will ship that day, the next day i still cant check my order status so i call them up and they say one of the items is out of stock and will be here tommorrow and will ship tomorrow as well. so i call them the next day to check tahey shipped it and they tell me the same thing. grr. i call them up again the next day and the say its in a status they cant check. Then i get an email saying a different part is out of stock and wont ship for two weeks!! So i ask them to ship everything but the part thats out of stock.. NO they cant do that i have to cancel my order and re-do my order (even tho on the site the part that wont be in stock says its available. So i reorder my stuff and search the web for another site that has the part they dont have. I call them up on Friday to check my order and they say it will ship friday and i will get a tracking #. Monday comes around and still no tracking # so i call them up and they say it is in prosesing and should ship that day! I write them an email saying Please ship today and i recive an email half an hour later with a tracking # that was shipped on SATURDAY? this company is just too confusing like this review!"
"CoolDrives is practically the only vendor of such multibay enclosures (and the best prices hands down). Several superb and uniquely designed single bay enclosures too. Though when it comes to multi-bay towers, as the site states, know what you are ordering or order elswhere. They are not a training ground for problems on ones pc or os. Mac users will not experience such problems as the use of multibay towers as single diasy-chain, raid 0, or raid 1 is built into OSX and a snap to set up. I spoke with very nice people before ordering regarding shipping. Email order and shipping confirmations with tracking #'s immediatley arrived in my in-box as expected from a well run website. Ordered a DK-7 QuadBay with all Masters and a 2.5" SC-S12CI USB/Firewire enclosure. Products arrived in good condition and were expertly packed. DK-7 was up and running in ~30 min with my 4 drives. Though, they shipped a 3.5" single enclosure by mistake (which was a beauty BTW), a call the next day was routed immediately to Rene who promptly gave his Fed-Ex# for me to ship the item back. He was interested in how my DK-7 was performing and we spoke about the returned item. Almost hated to return such a great product. My 2.5" version arrived about a week later and is performing fine. (Been having problems on the past at other sites with cheap 2.5" enclosures). This one rocks. The DK-7 rocks. Will definitely order again! Thanks Rene."
"This is one of the worst shops around. I purchased a USB/FIREWIRE drive from them for around $85.00. After a month the enclosures PSU wouldn't spin the 120 GB WD drive I had installed in it. I called and e-mailed Cooldrives several times and finally got a response about a month later. I sent the enclosure back to them at my expense. Six weeks later I had to call four times to check the status of the repair and got one of the owners on the phone. He said and I quote "we don't want business from people like you". Because I had gotten upset because no one had called me back or responded to my e-mails. "
"I ordered a usb to ata bridge with read only (Write-protect) Function. This device would do what I needed and to have the Function of selecting read only seemed like a bonus. When I tried to use the device I found that IT is only READ ONLY. The word Function would seem to be "this Function is selectable"
At this point it looks like they will let me return the product but with a 15% restock fee. I told them it was not my fault their wording was bad. They told me that is the way it is and they don't care and I should just go someplace else!!"
"I purchased a USB/Firewire 3.5" combo drive from them. It arrived a few days later, and I got several months good use out of it. Then, without warning, the enclosure failed, after I did some extensive tests ensuring that it wasn't the hard drive I had stuck in there that failed. So I contacted their support via email several times but didn't get any sort of reply. So I finally RMA'd it just before the warrantee expired. They fixed it, but it took them 3 months to do it, since it was a discontinued product and they had to order parts from Asia. They even admitted that they had told their web people to take the product off the website, but that hadn't happened, and they continue to get about 20-30 orders daily for it.
They don't respond to emails very quickly at all; it's usually necessary calling them on the phone to get results. However, they were polite and apologetic and did provide me with updates when the enclosure was being serviced. The enclosure is now fixed and works again, for which I am glad... but I do wish they could provide that information via email instead of providing it only over the phone.
Overall, I would suggest staying away from them. They may have a large selection, and at least in my experience, they were able to fix things in the end. However, my feeling is that their logistics leaves something to be desired (as would seem to be the case in the older reviews here), so be prepared for long delays if something wrong happens."
"Sent me a defective firewire enclosure, offered poor technical support, and then charged me a hefty restocking fee for the return. It was obvious that no one did any QA of this drive before shipping, despite there being stickers of quality assurance on the enclosure. I wish I had come here first to learn to stay away from this company (and it's many other names)."
"I purchased an 8 Bay Firewire 800 case with removeable bays. I had trouble getting Windows XP or 2K to recognize 120GB drives and contacted tech support. Tech support made no suggestions about how to solve the problem and said that if I didnt know how to use it I shouldnt have purchased it. That begs the question, why have tech support? When i didnt get an answer to my questions or any problem solving suggestions I assumed that the person who was on the other end of the email didn't have the experience to answer my question and suggested they put me in contact wth someone who had more experience. This they called a 'threat" and Rad, the tech, called me on the phone the next morning and asked me to stop harrassing his employees and was very indignant, arrogant, condescending, not to mention rude and obnoxious."
"Ordering was very easy. I find the marketing on their site to be misleading and incorrect. Customer Service stinks, they wanted to charge me for a duplicate receipt.
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"My first order for a 2.5" aluminum slim USB 2.0 enclosure went fine, it was delivered in three business days and worked as advertised.
My second order was for the same enclosure and I received the order a week later. The enclosure turned out to be defective after spending days troubleshooting and swapping the cable and HDD back and forth with the good enclosure from the first order.
I requested an RMA and returned the drive. I evenutally received a credit for the enclosure but they deducted a 15% restocking fee. While I understand the 15% fee for non-defective returns, this enclosure was clearly defective. Attempts to contact them by email and by phone resulted in no response or being given a run around.
Due to poor post-sale customer support, I will not be buying from this site again.
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"Wow what can I say, but this has been one of the worst online purchasing experiences of my life. If you like dealing with extremely rude people this company is for you. If you believe that the customer comes first and is always right I would avoid this company like the black plague!!! Be carefule of their sister company firewiremax.com as well!!!"
"Ordered two aluminum 2.5” portable USB 2.0 external enclosures and received them in 4 days. Units are good quality and work great with the PS/2 power adapter but will not work without it as I was told they would. May just be the HD i'm using but I suspect that none will work without the power cable. I would buy from them again."
"I ordered a 2 Port PCMCIA 1394-FireWire Adapter card to connect my laptop to my DV camcorder. I recieved no order confirmation e-mail. I send them a email about the order status but did not recieve any response. When i called up the customer support number, I only got a voice mail saying "office is closed for the holidays, please contact us on 6th jan 2003". Why wasn't I informed about this when i placed the order. sure enough I was not sure how to even cancel the order, since they did not respond to email, phone calls. finally I send a fax. They did send me an email confirming my cancellation. won't even visit there site now."
"Placed an order on the 6th was told will get shipped within 24 hours (Depending on credit card check)4 days later still didn't get any Email confirmation. Decided to call and was told that it was shipped that day due to two weeks shutdown during holiday. Understandable.
Got my order on the 15th. Opened the box, wrong item was sent. It was $20.00 cheaper than the one I paid for (But didn't get). It doesn't look that bad so I decided to keep it and call the next day. The guy was nice, he'll credit the difference to my card since I decided to keep it.
It seems like a small company just starting out. They just need someone who knows what they're doing to do the packing and shipping. Will I order from them again ? May be, may be not, depend on how many good review they got from here."
"I noticed there weren't many reviews for this company, so I thought I'd chime in. I took a chance on them and was very pleased. The ordering was easy, the delivery was quick, it was exactly what it was supposed to be. I even liked the fact that when I asked if the IBM was better than the Western Digital, they said something to the effect of "they all suck, but we test them before we send them out to make sure that you get one that is good." Sort of a frank knowing response that is refreshing. I do wish I could have specified IBM vs. Western Digital, but on the otherhand... I don't know if I cared that much as long as it came working - which it did. In fairness, I should mention that I did have to spend all of 30 seconds reformatting in OSX in order for it to work right for my mac ox9 or X - but I've had to do that for all five of my firewire drives even if they came preformatted. I will definitely buy my next drive from this company."
"This is the first time I ordered anything from this retailer. I ordered online and got confirmation of my order AND shipment within 24 hours. I also recived the order in 3 days instead of the usual 5 or 6 I get from UPS. The order was packaged well and was exactly what I ordered. The time from unpacking the USB drive to downloading data onto it was 5 minutes and most of that was because I like to pop the shipping poppies :)
Very good experience and would order from them again."