this is awesome, but not $446 worth of awesome.

goodness, that's a lotta money for an enclosure

This is a pretty sweet product. You can check out some videos at the manufacturer's website. It is a bit overkill for a consumer home backup solution. This is more of a small business product.

I agree... that's one expensive enclosure. I didn't know anyone still used firewire.

I can build a system w/ better performance for cheaper.. pass...

Which system would you build? The only viable alternative would be something like ZFS running on opensolaris. Most likely this would end up using a lot more power in the end and have no where near the plug and play ability of this system.

Don't get me wrong though. This product is awesome, but I have serious reservations of trusting my data to a proprietary layout algorithm. If it dies you need another drobo to access your data. If they go out of business... so do you!

Not a bad deal, however, the problem is that it doesn't come w/ any drives like the HP NAS does. By the time you add another drive that's another $100 bucks.

Gosh that's a lot of pretty penny to throw into a proprietory platform. I'd rather buy a good USB drive, manage it myself and with the saved money, fly over the weekend to Benelux for a sweet vacation.

This is actually a really well reviewed product. While it is proprietary, it is super flexible. Unfortunately, the NAS adapter is another $200.

Top Notch product if you can afford it. Great for Business arena were money is easier to come by.
If the biz went down they would make their software open source, that's the only way you couldn't have people showing up at your house with guns. Common practice in the industry.

Top notch? meh. It's convenient, but overpriced.

And anything costing that much without having network connectivity fails.

pricey...

all you poor bitches complain too much... just get a cheap ass enclosure and throw in a crappy hd... no money means no redundancy you dunces

i use use it for all my music, videos, pics and never have to worry about lossing them. works great if u can afford it

Think of this as a multi-drive enclosure that can do something like RAID-5. However, you don't need to have multiple drives of the same size, and having smaller drives doesn't limit the usable capacity of larger drives. Put whatever size drives in you want and Drobo automatically figures out how to do proper parity/redundancy across the drives. You can take out a small drive and upgrade it to a bigger one and Drobo will automatically reconfigure itself to make full use of all drives. Just watch the demo video.

http://www.drobo.com/Products/drobodemo.html

the $200 DroboShare add on sounds very nice.
i like how there are community created 'drobo apps' that can run on top of it for FTP and web servers, etc.

this is very tempting....
but oh so expensive...

I still can't see small businesses getting this over a dedicated server.

Own one and you will understand why the price is well worth it. Far better than any RAID 5 setup and extreamly flexable. If a drive fails you can replace it with what ever size you want and still take advatage of space that would otherwise be lost with RAID 5. My only problem is that its transfer rates are not very fast but for archiving who cares.

These are pretty cool, however they have their issues.

When they first came out they sent me a demo and I played with it for about a week. One day I was showing it off to someone and it locked up. I couldn't read my data, I couldn't add fresh disks or anything. It was completely hosed, all data lost.

I would be interested in reading some reviews if they have a newer version out now.