So if I put 3tb in one of these, how much usable space do I get without worrying about losing data?

Is Ben having a secret, sexy, love-in with a Drobo sales rep?

I mean seriously, this thing keeps showing up again and again. The Drobo is amazingly overpriced for essentially a smart RAID 1 external enclosure. It isn't even a NAS! Even with a rebate it is ridiculously overpriced for what it is capable of doing.

#1 - 1.5TB. Drobo does the same thing as WHS by duplicating EVERYTHING once a second drive is added. It is smart enough to provide 1.5TB when three 1TB drives are added. But how smart is $550 for 1.5TB of backed-up data? You could buy six or seven 1TB external drives for the same money.

@ mcnabney:

You are wrong. The Drobo does not do mirroring. It's more akin to RAID 5.

What also makes the Drobo handy is it's ability to use drives of different capacities and dynamically expand itself.

@ telstar:

Goto the Drobo website. They have a configurator that will tell you how much space will be available to you based on the drives you install.

For all those legally download mp3s...

What else would it be for?

"self-heals around drive failures and data errors" = RAID
"expands capacity dynamically when you add a drive" = Auto-Carving

From the ghetto demo, it looks like it's RAID 5 parity with auto-carving enabled(as #4 said). Not bad actually, but no NIC. So better to get a 3ware/LSI card and do it there. RAID 5 over a usb connection is a bit of a waste.

Let's see, usb 2.0 is 60 MBps and each drive can hit 50-65 MBps. So 65X3, and one drive for parity, and you get a loss of 135 MBps. If you have a gigabit ethernet connect you could get 125 MBps which would mean you only lose 30-70 MBps.

How exciting is math guys! I've got wood.

Agree the idea of the Drobo is good but it is way over price.

This way too expensive. How is this a deal?

Acer is the new competition for these.

Guys, $299 for this? Really? No way. Best bet is Opensolaris with ZFS and it is 100% free. Runs on almost any h/w now.... even that 4-5+ yr old celeron system. And can add any number of the cheapest drives you already have or can buy.

#7, the obvious answer is porn.

As #11 says. The new Acer AH340 looks like the way to go.

The AH340 would be a hell of a lot more attractive if it didn't run some piece of crap microshit OS.

#15,
+1

I don't think the AH340 allows mixing of different drives and doesn't have the ability to dynamically expand when you replace a small drive with a larger one.

Update:

Ooops. I was wrong. It does allow for these functions.

However, it doesn't offer the same level of redundancy that the Drobo offers where all data is protected in the event of a drive failure. With WHS, you must use "folder duplication" for redundancy.

I love my DNS-323!!

My friend has an older model Drobo and it works great. I don't think I could ever afford one nor would I purchase one had I the funds. That said, it certainly does its job so far as I can tell.

If this was only a lil cheaper. But depends on what you want to pay for your secured data.