Drobo FS DRDS2A21 10/100/1000 Ethernet Port Network External Hard Drive $399.99 w/FS @ Newegg.com

looks like an awesome deal

$100 off not bad

Quote from glico7122 : Drobo FS DRDS2A21 10/100/1000 Ethernet Port Network External Hard Drive $399.99 w/FS @ Newegg.com Newegg is offering additional $100 off promo code "DRNA425" today only. http://www.newegg.com/Product/Pro...22-240-035

Hmmm. Appears to contain no hard drives. Hard to tell what good it is except for RAID 5/6 applications, which almost no home user would ever care about.

Would be better for most people to just set up a computer of your own as a home server. You could do that with a couple of 1 TB discs for about the same price.

Quote from fymfaholes : Hmmm. Appears to contain no hard drives. Hard to tell what good it is except for RAID 5/6 applications, which almost no home user would ever care about. Would be better for most people to just set up a computer of your own as a home server. You could do that with a couple of 1 TB discs for about the same price.

Drobos are designed to be the RAID for the creative designer, photographer or home user who does not want to manage a RAID themselves.

The Drobo lets you mix and match drives and "magically" heals when you replace a drive.

One caveat is that they are slow with it sometimes taking several days to rebuild the RAID. While the Drobo was accesible during the rebuild your data was not safe from another drive failure.

Definitely a great price as far as Drobos go (and really for a 5 bay RAID/NAS box in general) but as phildo mentioned, they have a rep for being slower than traditional RAIDs.

So why not get a Windows Home Server machine? The HP N40L is a great example - costs around $250 regularly, so add $60 for a WHS license and you're now better off than the drobo. Has dead-simple configuration, full backup of all machines on your network that works great (I've used it for years, both WHS1 and WHS2011), and expandable forever. The HP I listed has 4 drive bays plus 6 USB ports and 1 eSATA, but you could just as easily install WHS on a physically bigger machine. My old WHS1 system ran 12 200gb IDE drives at one time... now my N40L has 4x 2TB internal, 2x2TB external USB3 (via an addin card), and I've still got the eSATA, another USB3, and 6 USB2 ports I could expand on as needed.

Oh, and with the Stablebit drivepool addin, I have full pooled storage with redundancy - if a drive fails, I pop it out and replace it and lose nothing. And I don't need matching drives or hours of downtime to rebuild arrays.

I've never understood the attraction of the Drobo - way too expensive for what it is. It's the apple of the storage world [putting on my fire-retardant suit now]

Quote from timropp : So why not get a Windows Home Server machine? The HP N40L is a great example - costs around $250 regularly, so add $60 for a WHS license and you're now better off than the drobo. Has dead-simple configuration, full backup of all machines on your network that works great (I've used it for years, both WHS1 and WHS2011), and expandable forever. The HP I listed has 4 drive bays plus 6 USB ports and 1 eSATA, but you could just as easily install WHS on a physically bigger machine. My old WHS1 system ran 12 200gb IDE drives at one time... now my N40L has 4x 2TB internal, 2x2TB external USB3 (via an addin card), and I've still got the eSATA, another USB3, and 6 USB2 ports I could expand on as needed. Oh, and with the Stablebit drivepool addin, I have full pooled storage with redundancy - if a drive fails, I pop it out and replace it and lose nothing. And I don't need matching drives or hours of downtime to rebuild arrays. I've never understood the attraction of the Drobo - way too expensive for what it is. It's the apple of the storage world [putting on my fire-retardant suit now]

Spot on assessment. You're paying for simplicity/ease of use in the drobo. Though, if you're remotely concerned about Raid or drive redundancy, you most likely can understand your post and handle a WHS setup.

good price, thank you. I've been waiting on these for awhile and just bought. Just plug, play, and stream from any room in the house.

no hard drives in this one. I purchased this a while back and was not satisfied with it. Returned it for a Synology DS1511+.

Quote from crimson773 : no hard drives in this one. I purchased this a while back and was not satisfied with it. Returned it for a Synology DS1511+.

Why were you not satisfied with it?

Overall, I think I'd rather build a server than go this route, but still, just curious.

I suggest you research this one before pulling the trigger... especially if you value your data!

Make sure you look at the real read/write throughput of this machine.
A lot of these types of "cheap" NAS boxes have 1Gb interface, but real-life transfer speed is far below even the slowest USB hard drive!
In many ways building a small general purpose server is cheaper in the long run because server can handle many things such as local files, bit-torrent type downloading, other services and do it at a very reasonable performance.

Quote from hallowmann : Why were you not satisfied with it? Overall, I think I'd rather build a server than go this route, but still, just curious.

It's been a few months, but mostly the throughput was very slow and I had a lot of problems getting it to be recognized on my network. Additionally, it would intermittently drop connection right in the middle of copying a file or if I was browsing the volumes. Plus there wasn't much in the way of support.