I'm currently packing up a lot of stuff, and I just came across the many hard drives I was holding onto to use in a possible Drobo purchase. I probably wouldn't use these anymore, seeing as only two are 750GB and the other five are less than 250GB, but I'm still curious about trying a Drobo or something like it. Are they any good? Are they reliable?

I don't plan on working from this drive for daily-use files. This is more of a background storage, and perhaps for streaming video. I plan to store stuff on this thing that wouldn't be the end of the world if it got deleted. It might also by my local mirror of the stuff I have on my Crashplan backup.

So what do you think of Drobo? I'm drawn to the idea of mixed discs, and of being able to easily swap out any failed drive. If those things don't work well, it would be good to know. I really don't feel like managing a NAS or do much/any work on it.