I bought a Drobo back in August 2008. Like many, I bought it because, though it was very expensive, I thought I was buying bullet-proof protection for various files used over our network. (My wife is a graphic designer and we work on multiple projects together where I do the photography and pre-press and she works on the layout, etc.) Back in June, I was trying to sync files I have on another NAS drive, a SimpleTech, and the Drobo suffered a horrible crash when it took itself (and the Droboshare) offline in the middle of large-scale copying. With help from tech support, I eventually recovered everything. Fast forward to August. I was working on images in Lightroom, saving them to the Drobo, and doing additional work in Photoshop, resaving, and saving CMYK versions. To my horror, I discovered that a number of the files were corrupt and would not open (something that NEVER happened on the Simpletech drive over the past three years). I ended up having to reconvert some files, and saved everything on my Simpletech. Data Robotics never really solved the problem.
Then, over the past couple of weeks, I've been working on another shoot and doing pre-press on 140+ images. The same corruption happened to the TIFF files. I started working on the Simpletech, and again, no problems. Now Data Robotics is saying, so sorry, warranty expired. You can renew for $130, even though this problem is an extension to what has been occurring over the past few months.
My advise: DO NOT BUY A DROBO! THEY DO NOT STAND BEHIND THEIR PRODUCT. Instead, buy a Synology DS209+. Much faster, much cheaper, though it's "only" a two drive unit. Now I'm out $800 for the Drobo Gen2 and Droboshare. Anyone want to buy a Drobo REALLY cheap?
Nemo