The Drobo just doesn't seem ready for prime time, even though its in its second rev.

I can't get over the fact they offer Firewire 800 and Windows in all cases is unable to get any decent speed. With stock drivers you get at most Firewire400 speeds. Using Unibrain drivers with a supported card (perhaps their own would be best) people are getting higher speeds, but nothing to write home about. PLUS, the unibrain driver is limited to 2TB where I've read the stock driver isn't.

Moving over to the Mac you'll still find a lot of complaints about slow speed and disk corruption.

The idea is cool, but it just doesn't seem to work (at least not reliably), despite their marketing.

I'd love to move to a 4 drive box in the future - as early as spring. Right now I've got two 1.5TB Seagates with updated firmware in a RAID 1 box from NewerTech (Guardian Maximus). I'd like to get a Unibrain PCIe FW800 card so I can start using that instead of USB since it's connected to my Windows-based PVR which runs on a mobo without any FW ports.

I was very much looking at a drobo as a nice solution to having the disks externally in a small box instead of using an onboard raid controller. A bonus is that it supports 4 drives where most onboard controllers on workstation mobos only support 2.

The external RAID is currently being used to store media for my PVR as well as all the music for my SlimCenter. The idea of updating to 4 disks is so that I can also start using the same "box" for the TV capture/recording.