Check out the comments on Zonbu; apparently you can get the same computer directly from the manufacturer for less.
Hmm... worth looking at. Thanks Ian.
I really ought to wait until I have a specific project in mind though - I have too many toys already. 
I don't find the Drobo too enticing, myself. It seems like a lot of cash for what is essentialy a USB drive enclosure, albeit one with hardware replication across drives (that is, not RAID but like RAID), especially when compared to prices for competing network-connected RAID enclosures. I'd also worry about how accessible my data is when the drives are outside the Drobo -- it's bound to break someday, and I'd hate for "buy another one" to be the only feasible recovery option for the data on your 4 HDs (and if it uses unique IDs on the partitions or something, even that might not be an option). I mean, there's the question of how it is that it spreads data across the disks, and how you'd go about piecing them back together into a single filesystem, and the fact that it supposedly only allows certain filesystems to be used on the "virtual" 2TB device it presents to the OS suggests it is doing something "intelligent" which will make recovery even more difficult.
I suppose it might be worth the premium if you either already had a server to attach it to or perhaps weren't interested in network access at all but did have several drives of different sizes which you were determined to get the most capacity out of -- but I wonder if it wouldn't end up costing just the same to get a competing RAID product and brand new drives? Considering most of those networked RAID devices run Linux and are able to also do some other nifty stuff (like automated backups to an online storage service), the Drobo just doesn't excite me. Still, there's a review at ArsTechnica which I haven't really read through yet that might demonstrate it to be much cooler than I suspect.
I guess I hear to many horror stories about RAID, and one less thing to administer sounds good.
I understand that trying to recover data from a screwed up RAID system isn't much fun either...
I guess what I was saying is if you consider it hard to recover a RAID system, imagine how much worse it would be if you didn't even know how the data was stored on the drives you're trying to recover. RAID at least results in a static, configured-at-installation-time 1-block-to-1-block mapping of data between HDs (as a result of requiring same-sized drives), while the Drobo dynamically changes the mappings between *portions* of drives as new drives are added or removed -- I wonder if those dynamic partitionings of the drives will become more and more numerous and fragmented if you upgrade drives often enough?
That said, you also need to remember that there are several different types of RAID, but the only ones you should compare horror stories with to the Drobo are the ones actually meant to make data safe (as opposed to the ones designed to make data half as safe but faster to access, like RAID 0), which are basically RAID 1 and RAID 5 (RAID 5 is the most like the Drobo, I think). Neither of those can recover from a loss of more than half of the drives they're spread across, but neither can the Drobo, I assume.
If I were looking for an easy-to-administer data integrity solution (not that I actually store my personal data on anything other than a single 320GB drive with no backups to speak of), I'd prefer an easy-to-use hardware RAID 1 solution -- RAID 1 basically works by making a bit-for-bit "full-disk image" of a drive (like those produced by programs like Norton Ghost) to a second HD and then keeping that image synchronized on every write. So if one of the drives dies you still have a full copy of all your data (which can be copied as a "full-disk image" to a new hard drive which can then replace the dead drive -- usually this process is transparent and automated by the RAID controller every time you pull out a drive and put in a new one (hot-swap), though it does slow down access to the drive it is copying from while it is making the full-disk copy). And if the RAID controller dies, it just means your have a regular, working disk with all your information on it, and another regular, working disk with all your information on it. In other words, recovery involves taking either of the two drives and connecting it to a standard controller of whatever type of drive it is (SATA/IDE/whatever), even an external USB box.
It's pretty fool-proof as an idea, the problems (and horror stories) come when the RAID controller requires complex configuring to get it to actually do this, or when it relies on a weird on-disk format rather than just writing through everything it receives (in which case a dead RAID controller doesn't equal two functioning but separate disks, just two separate disks which will need a new RAID controller before you can access them). Also you have to pay for two hard drives but then only get to "use" one of them (since the other is just an exact copy, space-wise).
Commenting by HaloScan
