I went for the Drobo mainly because if I need to increase the disc space all I have to do is swap out a hard drive and add a new one in. It also sort of backs up my data and protects it from hard drive crashes (as long as I have more than one hard drive in there) without requiring me to do anything.
Setting the device up was a breeze. I just plugged in the hard drives I bought and then plugged the Drobo into my Mac via USB. I then just moved my iTunes library over from my external hard drive to my Drobo via iTunes and the task was complete. The transfer was so simple I decided to open up all my external hard drives and pull the drives out and put it into my Drobo to increase the space of my Drobo. I now have 4 hard drives sitting in my Drobo.
As I had so much free space i decided that I would do something I had never properly done before.... back up my computer. I setup Time Machine to back up my Mac to the Drobo and now I have my machine backed up on a regular basis without requiring much interaction by me.
As good as the Drobo is there are a few downsides. Although I have a total of 3TB worth of hard drive space plugged into the Drobo only 1.81TB of space to use as the other space is used to back up the hard drives (although this is also somewhat a positive). I previously plugged in all my external hard drives via firewire as I am a little short on space USB sockets but the Drobo can only be connected via USB, however I guess I might be able to get around this if I could be bothered to use an external USB hub. For the most part I can't really hear to much from the Drobo but there are occasions when the fan kicks in for a short period of time and it starts to make a really loud whirling noise. Also the Drobo is very expensive when you factor in the cost of a few hard drives you are easily into the few hundreds of pounds, but personally I see this as a long term purchase so over a long term it should be better value for money.
All in all I am rather happy with the Drobo as it's been running away happily for a few weeks now and the shinney black finish and green and blue lights make it look cooler than the average external hard drive.
