Breaking it down

I will concentrate on these categories:

Price

Dependability

Uniqueness

Ease of use

Speed

Support

Sum it up


The title will be category followed by grade if there is one. I do not claim to be totally impartial, since I paid using my own money, I had some skin in the game. I work hard for that money and expect to get what I paid for. $1 or $100, makes no difference.

**additional info**
The owner's name was Rechavia Elias

Facebook: http://www.facebook.com/people/Rechavia-Elias/673598950

Email: rechavia1@gmail.com

Price F-

No grade on this one since I paid $4 for a month, but that was a special discount price to drum up business.

As you will see in the rest of the review Petandrive will need to find an acceptable price point that people are willing to pay and still not feel they are getting taken because of some of Petandrive's failings.

I saw somewhere else that the price might fall between 20 and 40 dollars a month. If that is accurate they would need to address these problems before rolling that out. If not that might leave many people feeling burned, news would spread like wildfire on the internet, and they would be left without much business and a trashed reputation.

You don't get many chances in the business world and even less with an internet business, bad word of mouth lasts forever.

**update**

Well, with things not actually working even at $4 the price is too much. Grade is now F-.

**additional info**
The owner's name was Rechavia Elias

Facebook: http://www.facebook.com/people/Rechavia-Elias/673598950

Email: rechavia1@gmail.com

Dependability F-

I continued to have problems with a steady connection throughout my tryout. The Petandrive bulk downloader will occasionally just stop working on a particular file and this was on a wired connection. I DO NOT recommend users use a wireless connection as it can get very frustrating having to exit and restart the software every few files. I'm not saying the software should somehow be able to make a steady internet connection where there is none, that would be ridiculous, I'm saying it should be able to handle and recover from those incidents rather than just grind to a halt.

This next problem left me shaking my head over what is supposed to be a professional site:

Over one particular weekend I could not get the Petandrive downloader software to "login". When I went to the site to check things out I got this scrawled across the top of the screen.

Warning: session_start() [function.session-start]: open(/tmp/sess_ee841ae0234372eb7ef52e002… O_RDWR) failed: No space left on device (28) in /home/petandri/public_html/vsys.php on line 10

It was fixed within an hour or two, but come on...who is minding the store here. In my business and yours too probably somebody would be losing their job. And the out of space error message on a service offering so much space is just laughable.

This may seem like a harsh grade for something that works okay most of the time, but when you are paying for something you expect it to work when you need it and after all the category is dependability.

**update**

YET ANOTHER ERROR trying to access the files on my account:

error: "/home/petandri/public_html/storage/disk3/xxxxx/.files/" is not writable

This last error has been going on almost 24 hours now.

No announcement about maintenance so I thought I would check their forum and got:

General Error
SQL ERROR [ mysql4 ]

Table './petandri_forum/phpbb_sessions' is marked as crashed and should be repaired [145]

An sql error occurred while fetching this page. Please contact an administrator if this problem persists.

**update**

It finally came back up after 3-4 days but now the speed is less than 50kb/s. Reminds me of the dialup days.

--

Just wow!


I really don't know what the problem is with these guys, they just seem to have the minimum or NO fallback safeguards, standardized procedures, or quality control.

I have changed this grade from a D- to and F-

**additional info**
The owner's name was Rechavia Elias

Facebook: http://www.facebook.com/people/Rechavia-Elias/673598950

Email: rechavia1@gmail.com

Uniqueness F-

Petandrive comes with some cool features like the online explorer treeview and the grab a folder function.

Also the bulk downloader software while looking very amateurish gives you a drive accessible through windows explorer. As long as you remember it is NOT a real drive and other software will not react to it normally. I believe the problems trying to treat it as such all stem from the connection lag.

Unfortunately their execution of these features is very poor, and currently not usable at all. Sorry, you can have all the great ideas in the world but if you don't execute them then they are worthless. Downgraded to an F-

**additional info**
The owner's name was Rechavia Elias

Facebook: http://www.facebook.com/people/Rechavia-Elias/673598950

Email: rechavia1@gmail.com

Ease of Use F-

Signup was kind of a hassle because you could only go through Paypal.

Finding the downloadable software on their site was also harder than it should be, it should be right there, impossible to miss, but it wasn't.

The Petandrive downloader is not always intuitive, but most users should have no problem. You can't expand the window of the downloader(well, you can, but everything within it stays the same size) so you have to use the scroll bar far to much. The software is functional, but not pretty.

I have downgraded this to a F- since it is difficult to separate ease of use from the horrible dependability and the current speed. It is not easy to use if it is not usable.

**additional info**
The owner's name was Rechavia Elias

Facebook: http://www.facebook.com/people/Rechavia-Elias/673598950

Email: rechavia1@gmail.com

Speed F-

For a paid service I expected better. Also the Petandrive downloader application appears to report a higher speed than you are actually receiving. As reported under dependability the speed sometimes drops to zero.

So setting a folder to download in the morning before I go to work and hoping to have it done when I got home just doesn't work. This completely undermines the whole idea of a bulk downloader. The software should be smart enough to stop and restart that file after several minutes of zero speed or know to move on to the next file.

I came home one day to find the Petandrive application had just crashed.

After the latest outage (see under dependability) the speed is now less than 50 kb/s. Appropriately I have dropped this score to a F-.

**additional info**
The owner's name was Rechavia Elias

Facebook: http://www.facebook.com/people/Rechavia-Elias/673598950

Email: rechavia1@gmail.com

Support F-

I NEVER GOT AN ANSWER TO ONE EMAIL. This utter lack of support does not bode well for repeat business. My guess is that they are ignoring the emails or there is such a backlog of users reporting the same problems I have experienced that they have yet to get to mine. My month may well be up before they ever get to me. Sorry, anything beyond a few days is unacceptable.

**update**

I did finally get a response to an email. But the response was only a thanks for reporting it. No sorry, no compensation for lost service.

Also, oddly, the response was for a later email, not the first one.

No responses about the latest outage, no announcement on the website about problems.

Very disappointing.

**additional info**
The owner's name was Rechavia Elias

Facebook: http://www.facebook.com/people/Rechavia-Elias/673598950

Email: rechavia1@gmail.com

Sum it up F-

It is unfortunate that with so many unique features they have brought to the file storage business they fail in several areas. The poor performance on dependability and support brought the overall score down to a C-, they barely squeaked by a D+ by 1 point.

**update** due to the speed issue after the latest outage and the impact it had on the various categories the overall grade has dropped to a F-. I DO NOT RECOMMEND A PREMIUM ACCOUNT, ONLY DOWNLOAD WHAT YOU CAN GET FOR FREE, and even then you will find it frustrating. Why bother at less than 50kb/s.

Unless they can address these issues I don't anticipate them being in business long. I also believe when the end comes it will be sudden and without warning.

My suggestion would be that if you do decide to take a chance on them you use the credit card option with PayPal so that you have 2 options to get your money back, PayPal, and then your credit card company.

DO NOT put anything out there that you have no copy of.

Also, do not upload anything sensitive that is not zipped with a password. This is not a plug, but 7zip makes a zipper/unzipper that handles an amazing number of formats. Best of all its free. And it allows you to zip a file with a password, which should be sufficient to handle most sensitive data. If your data is so sensitive you feel you must use actual encryption/decryption software you might want to rethink saving it here.

I WOULD NEVER EVER save any company data here.

I would not get involved in their affiliate program, I see lots of comments around the internet where people are feeling ripped off.

Also, if you are downloading lots of stuff be sure you don't get into trouble with your internet provider. Some of them are starting to crack down on the amounts of data you can download each month before your start incurring extra charges. And it can be easy to get carried away with a service like this.

Regards, be careful out there...

**additional info**
The owner's name was Rechavia Elias

Facebook: http://www.facebook.com/people/Rechavia-Elias/673598950

Email: rechavia1@gmail.com