Gotcha - hadn't seen that. Interesting that it so readily tested better on the firewire stuff, the info I had read for both burst and sustained was so low that I assumed there would be no noticeable difference at all between interfaces.
(I still think the drobo is far too slow for the price they want for it, not that its too fast to make a good backup device, but it certainly doesn't perform like what a device its cost should in my opinion)
For me, the attractiveness is in it's ability to grow over time by just replacing one drive at a time and the redundancy it affords. By comparison, I also have a NAS that I have configured to a RAID 5 setup. It currently has four 1TB drives. When it fills up and I want to make it bigger, I'll have to find a place to temporarily put all the files, then replace the four 1TB drives with four larger drives all at the same time. On the Drobo, just replace one of the smaller drives with a larger one as your space requirements increase. Also, as time progress, the price of drives also drop, this saves you money. Also, the NAS that I have is actually slower than the Drobo when configured to RAID 5 and that's over gigabit ethernet.
In my opinion, that makes the Drobo just about the perfect device for storage/archival. It is NOT mean to be the scratch disk for Photoshop, etc. Currently, Drobos can often be found at approx $300-$320 which makes it quite competitive to most of the RAID 5 enclosures I've seen. I compare it with RAID 5 enclosures because they offer similar levels of redundnacy and the redundancy overhead is eerily similar.