Against my better judgement, I'm going to wade back into this thread a bit, hopefully just one last time. I was away on business so I got to miss all the fun, poor me...
So, just like when I spec things for work, I actually think about requirements before buying something - shocking, I know. I figure out what's got to be there, what's nice and what's noise. I then balance that against performance and price.
My requirements for redundant storage were pretty simple:
* Use the native OS without any extra software (required or "nice to have")
* Non-proprietary recovery of a failed single disk or array
* Reasonable performance (read/write)
Drobo doesn't pass muster on the first two items, and it raised eyebrows on the third. It's unsettling to hear more than a few reports of slow Drobo units. Sure, there are counter-examples of fast units, but what makes one fast and another slow? I didn't want to have to deal with chance or even worse, change my workflow to accommodate a storage unit.
Another non-starter (or showstopper, if you will) was the inability to self-recover a failed drive. Here, I'm referring to repairing or recovering a drive that failed within the set after it was replaced. With the configuration I went with, I still have a chance of fixing the drive if I so choose to do so, with off the shelf software. Worst case, I can send that one disk to a disk recovery company, but that's worst case.
That alone was enough to force me to look away from the Drobo unit. But the thing that stuck with me was the fact that there's a non-zero risk of losing all data with a Drobo - it's happened before and it's documented. Hell, the whole reason you're going to redundant disks is to de-risk - now you're going the opposite way by using a Drobo. You put ALL of your data on a Drobo at some non-zero level of risk, and when that happens you are absolutely dependent on Drobo the company to save your ass. All of your disks then have to go to Drobo and you lose physical control of everything you have while you wait for them to (try to) recover it, for a fee.
That's the definition of proprietary. Not sure where you kids hail from, but single-source isn't approved around here - not from a smaller company like Drobo.
Things clearer now? I did like the personal attacks, that was humorous for people that don't know me to ass*u*me that I was some clueless idiot, then post the same. I *especially* liked the "automagic" defense of the Drobo box. Yeah, no.