My main gripe about Drobo has been that it's a 1.0 product - which these days means beta. Drobo just Drobo 2.0, so I'm waiting for the reviews to come in and placing my order if it's promising.

It has USB 2.0 and Firewire and "improved performance," whatever that really means.

EDIT: According to them it means "...the new Drobo is up to three times as fast its predecessor in typical usage." I'll wait for the benchmarks.

EDIT2: "Anyhow, if you're just in it for the speed, we found the new Drobo does deliver -- although maybe not on the same levels demonstrated by Data Robotics. Their tests show fairly consistent speed increases of over 2x on writes and between 60-100% on reads using AJA Kona. We did all our tests using Xbench, which showed more conservative improvements over the first-gen device. Using a set of four varied SATA drives, we got somewhat smaller speed increases over USB, usually in the range of 10-20%. Occasionally we got up to 100%+ on some operations (like 4k block uncached random writes) -- but on other operations the new Drobo was actually a slight bit slower (like 256k random uncached reads)." from Engadget

The main gripe we owners have is not it's speed - it's lack of space. We want much more than a 4 bay system. Yes they prominantly advertise 'up to 16GB space' - with the small print of (when larger drives come out). 2.8TB is the max we get right now, and at 2.4TB we get a VERY annoying popup message that says you are at 85% capacity, add more drives. Yeah, great.

Sharkoon has a nice gadget for bulk S-ATA discs which connects via eSATA to the workstation. Simple, cheap and small, you pop in a bulk HD, that's it.

http://www.sharkoon.com/html/produkte/exte...o/index_en.html

That is nothing like a Drobo or RAID, that's just an external HD adaptor.

That's right, but for the price difference you can buy two 1Tb HD's.

Or a bunch of latte's, what's your point? It's not what we are talking about at all.

I believe it *is* what we are talking about - external storage. The Drobo, while cute and *seriously* overpriced has a fatal flaw - during array rebuild or upgrade there is no redundancy, if there is a power outage during a rebuild - you are screwed - factor in battery backup with 5-7 hour capacity for rebuilding a nearly full Drobo. With RAID-5 a power outage during rebuild simply means you start start the rebuild over . . .

You don't buy a Drobo just for external storage. For that matter you could throw in DVDs or a stack of CF cards to the discussion if that's what you think it's about. Drobos (and most RAID units) are for *redundant* storage, not just external. I would love an internal Drobo. I have 6 drives inside my case, 4 in my drobo and one on my desk.

Yes, during an upgrade you are vulnerable, and it fully warns you before hand. At least you have the option, unlike anything else.

You don't??? Isn't external storage in and of itself a form of redundancy? Whats more *redundant* about a Drobo than a rotation of external drives holding the same information? Of course upgrading capacity is cheap - plus you get the advantage of archiving the old ones . . . .

Why let a chassis limit the number of spindles you keep your information on?

Redundancy, uptime and ease-of-use.

And Drobo is not meant for backup.

You are very, very confused.

No, external storage does not mean redundant.

Drobo (and some RAID arrays) offer yes, an external storage solution, but that is not why they are unique. They offer realtime data protection in a RAID5 like array. Meaning it is protected in realtime against single drive failure. Meaning unlike a simple external drive, if one tanks, you lose nothing including operation of the device.

All the data on my Drobo is available and protected. I not only duplicate some of the data on my internal array for yes, double redundant protection, but I also store data only on the Drobo that is less critical but needs to be protected none the less.

External drives are for transport, backup, or limited capacity primary use. They can not offer the features in a Drobo or some RAID arrays.

If you don't know what you're talking about, ask questions, don't make incorrect statements.

Why not run a software raid against several external drives?

I ran a windows raid 5 against something like 114 drives. (Maybe not that many. But I think I had that many hooked up.) Took a week or so to format.

Because that requires your CPU to do WAY too much work. The performance of that compared to a dedicated hardware RAID setup is night and day. Not to mention the rediculous power requirements in sockets alone.

I'm not confused at all, rather *you* seem to misunderstand the difference between redundancy and fault tolerance. You also appear to be making assumptions about my workflow and methods which, considering your reliance on a Drobo, are very different than mine:

A pair (or more) of external drives containing the same information are redundant.

A RAID 5 array *may* be redundant and *may* or *may not* be fault tolerant depending on exactly what fails.

A mis-configured Drobo or one that is undergoing a rebuild is neither fault tolerant nor redundant. Furthermore, if the Drobo chassis itself fails - your *only* option is to replace that expensive chassis with an identical one.

In short, I do understand what I'm talking about and choose to invest my storage dollars directly in storage.

To offer *your own* advice - you would do well to ask questions, and not offer uninformed opinions based on incorrect assumptions . . . .