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This is breathtakingly expensive.
Not needed for private usage.
Inadequate for business usage.
Fits a niche market of absolutely no-one.

Unsurprising to find it appearing here as buy.com has been commissioned to unload truckloads of unsold inventory. Shame they haven't slashed the price as the product still won't move.

$410 after rebate with free shipping at Amazon.
Still too expensive.

Actually, depending on the UI and the media-serving and backup capabilities, this might be perfect for advanced home users and small businesses.

So you really need the ability to hot-swap and dynamically increase your storage capacity at home?

Most home users can accept some storage downtime while they rebuild their raids.
This device completely ignores what the "i" in raid stands for.

Wow! Will it clean my house as well?

The acronym 'RAID' was coined in the late 80s. Back then 'inexpensive' meant less than $20 per megabyte. If you were to order this device now and put 4 - 1 TB drives (~$100) in it, you'd be paying $0.0002065 per megabyte. That's pretty 'inexpensive' to me.

how about an mvixbox? seems to be much better suited for the home user.

#4:

it ignores "independent" ?

This is not a good price. Buy has had it for $380 before. That said, the ease of use is the selling point for the Drobo. This would be perfect for my dad has multiple .5-1 TB discks for photography and videography, but he doesn't know how to set up RAID.

In fact, this would be perfect for anyone with an HD camcorder... those files are +50gb for an hour!

Still think the HP MediaSmart boxes are far more capable for the price.

looks like a mini fridge

Exactly right, #9...we have a Mac guy at work who does all our video editing, and the Drobo is just what he needed..bacon's basically a humongous scratch drive he can play with...sure it's pricey, but the ease of use makes up for it. We just popped in 4 1TB drives and the box did the rest...

No, #8. In your case, "i" stands for irritating, ignorant, intractable, isolated, incomprehensible, ill-conceived, imbecile.

#6: So you judge a term by the meaning ascribed to it when it was first coined? You are obviously in a "ghey" (incorrect spelling used to avoid Ben's filter, thus ruining my point) mood. I suggest you have some intercourse with #8 and let us know how you got on.

#13, while I agree with most of your remarks, the "I" has been revised to "Independent" so your attack on #8 is uncalled for. Anyway, the disks are inexpensive, RAID hardware has never been, other than what is implemented on the motherboard. Now, if you want to rant about RAID 0 and the "R", I'll totally agree.

I also believe this uses some proprietary scheme for redundancy and not any of the RAID levels. I could be wrong.

A competitor to this would be Windows Home Server. I agree with you, on the expensive side for home use, too basic for enterprise. The only use would be for backup for a 1 or 2 person business that handle lots of data (eg. professional photographers / videographers).

I'd recommend this product to someone who had a bunch of getting-close-to-broken hard drives around.

The Drobo is a fine way to use lots of drives together to make one big protected volume. And the fact that you can format it to be 8 Terabytes (only over FireWire or the NAS product called DroboShare, under Windows Vista) and then keep putting bigger and bigger drives in there until you reach the limit is pretty cool.

I find that Drobo's get around 15-24 MB/s, so it's more than enough for HD video, but no speed demon.

Got a bunch of hard drives around but sickened by the thought of putting them all in your computer and configuring (and then later rebuilding) a RAID array in your BIOS? Look into this unit!

#15, doesn't make much sense. Say you have a bunch of getting-close-to-broken hard drives around, worth (at most) $20 each on fleabay. To use $80 worth of hard drives that may fail at any time, you spend $400+? Do you work for the government or the military?

For this kind of money get a Windows Home Server and gain far more usability and many more features.

/12TB on my WHS

This microwave takes forevar.

#19, massive fail.