I bought a Drobo when they first came out and I can thoroughly recommend it.
If you have data that you can't afford to lose and you don't want the complications of upgrading in the future (a burden in standard raid systems), the price should not concern you, they are not that outrageous!
I even had a real life drama to share:
When I first got my Drobo, I just threw a couple of 400Gb drives into it. As the 1TB drives came down, I added a couple of those along the way.
Yes it was as easy as the video shows, I just pushed the new, different size drives in & forgot about it.
A couple of months ago, I needed a spare drive, so I thought, I'd steal one of the old 400Gb drives from the Drobo, I just pulled the drive and went on to use it elsewhere, left the Drobo to worry about sorting itself out.
Naturally, it goes through a process of management when you do these things, the lights were flashing yellow, but Drobo's really do give you piece of mind and I wasn't worried at all and went about my business.
Shortly after this, we had a power outage, of all the days it had to be the day I decided to pull a drive from my all important data storage device :-0
The power was out for a long time, my UPS died prematurely also due to the batteries going defective :-(
I must admit I kinda felt sick to think all my data might be lost and when the power finally returned, I actually didn't power up the Drobo for a couple of hours. The reasons were, firstly, I wanted to be sure the power restoration wasn't temporary and secondly, I couldn't bring myself to know for sure if I had a corrupt / empty system because of the power outage whilst it was managing the storage removal.
Of-course the answer was it booted up and everything was safe, otherwise I probably still couldn't bring myself to talk about it
No-one, will convince me here that Drobo is not worth the money!!
For those that need larger capacity and have an issue about gigabit ethernet, there is of-course Drobo Pro now too with an 8 bay chassis and iSCSI interface !
