I have one last update on the Drobo saga. It turns out that the SilenX fan I used to replace the stock fan was a poor choice. The drives ran noticeably hotter and I came home one day to my Drobo lit up in red lights. I presume this was due to thermal issues, but the Drobo really doesn't give any feedback about the fault.

I ended up re-replacing the fan with the Noctua NF-R8 that was used in the tear-down I posted earlier. The Noctua is only slightly louder than the SilenX, but the drives stay significantly cooler. After a month of constant access, the Drobo is humming along as happy as can be.

As for, Firewire... [rant]It's really shocking how Windows does not play well with Firewire at all. I put a card in with a completely different chipset and I got the same crap. The UniBrain drivers helped a bit with respect to Drobo, but they were completely useless for my Canopus ADVC110. I use the Canopus thing to import analog video as DV. Before I sold my MacBook Pro, it worked swimmingly. In Windows, it was producing flaky results whether I used the new or old 1394 card.[/rant]

I decided to just stick with USB2 for the Drobo and, for the price of a meal, I picked up a 350MHz PowerMac G4 from a friend. A 1GHz G4 upgrade chip is on the way, but even without it, the PowerMac just works. Someone got it right, and it was a long time ago.