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.
While the Drobo masks the RAID setup, it's still RAID under the hood for the most part. Putting in mixed drive sizes will not result in the availability of all the space. They have a drive space calculator here, and watch as the purple "reserved for expansion" part appears when mixing drive sizes.
http://www.drobo.com/products/capacity-calculator/Their tech is pretty much identical to what Netgear calls
XRAID-2, and what other vendors also support.
The main differences out there all come down to your needs. Do you just want a larger local disk attached over USB? Or do you want a box that sits on the network and shares files to any computer?
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