I would be very interested to know if anyone is using the Drobo for external storage. If so what has been their experience?

Hey I edited the title for clarity, and moved it into the Peripherals forum. I haven't used a Drobo but I do want one.

Also how would one use a Drobo for internal storage?

I just want Drobo to have a nic or firewire port usb2 is such a let down

Firewire and/or a ethernet would not get you much as the USB is not the Drobos speed bottleneck but if you really need ethernet that's what Drobo share or an Airport Extreme with Airdisk is for.

Bought one last week and love it. I have it connected to an Airport Extreme and use it as an Airdisk. Everyone bitches and moans that it doesn't have firewire, but the USB2 is fast enough. I use mine solely for keeping all my photo's, video's and documents.
She is loaded up with 4 x 500GB drives and runs fairly quiet. I keep it in my study which is deathly quiet, and only when she is working hard can I hear a faint hum of the fans.

For my initial backup, I connected to Drobo to each of my machines via USB (100's of GBs of data). Now when I want to add a new photo session, only a couple of 100MBs, speeds over wireless are fine.

As a drive to perform on the fly video editing, I wouldn't recommend it due to slow internal speeds; but as a sole backup drive, I love it. I found in my research that the people who bad mouth the Drobo don't actually own one.

Anyone using a Network Attahed Storage solution, such as the Buffalo Terra Station?

I was hoping to use the Time Capsule as a NAS but alas, its not a substitute for a real NAS.

Anyone got any suggestions?

I use one of these:
LaCie - Ethernet Disk mini - Home Edition - Gigabit Ethernet
I think there is a review on here somewhere.

i use this with two 500gb drives in it

I have. I like. 3x 750GB hard disks. I attach to my "server" PowerBook G4, which file shares to other Macs. Good.

Would probably drive me nuts with constant hard disk/fan noise if placed beside my main computer. But it's physically somewhere else, so OK.

Firewire... would be nice, but not a dealbreaker (for me).

I own three of them. Two are now sitting in the original boxes. Each populated with 4 - 1 TB drives.

I had nothing but trouble with two of them. What I do not like is the formatting of the drive that if the DROBO fails (and they do, trust me) you cannot move the drive even to another DROBO... You are shit-outta-luck (you all know that technical term)!

I have gone to a different system that allows me to swap HDs and my only regret is that I cannot have a "physical" drive larger than 1 TB. That is the ONLY thing I miss.

The third one is used with a Power PC Dual Core running 10.5.4 and used primarily for film editing - not a problem - ever.

So, this topic is a mixed bag for me. When I first "discovered" the Drobo, I was an ardent evangelist but as I kept having problems and according to the Drobo Technical Support People, it was never the Drobo that was having the problem.

Well, I have two in boxes that prove that wrong.

How much am I out of pocket? 2 Drobos and 8 - t TB Hitachi drives - do the maths.

Would I recommend them - not on your life.

I really do not care whether it is firewire or duck tape, it isn't the connection speed that is the problem, it is the internals, firmware and drivers.

Oh, that's right how could there be any drivers, it is only a USB connection.
Hmmm - my colour laser printer (USB) needs drivers.

Anyway, I digress.

I give the Drobo a minus 10 stars.

MizuInOz why haven't you pulled out the 8TB of HD from the first two?
What's actually wrong with the drives as opposed to the Drobo?
I'm personally not a supporter of the Drobo - much prefer my own workaround solutions.

I guess this is because the system is a striped RAID.

You could move all the striped disks to a new Drobo and they would work.

1TB Hitachi SATA HDD's are good / fast drives, why not find an enclosure that utilises RAID or non-RAID in a faster manner?
Drobo's are great if you've scrambled around your house / work place and have found an array of different SATA drives with different capacities...and you want to use it as a simple back up device.

just watch any episode of macbreak weekly :P

I think you guys are getting confused.

A raid stripe is in the format of raid 0, this means if you lose a disk you lose the whole array.

For your data to be redundant you need a raid 1, 3, 5, 6 etc. Do some research and you will find the advantages of each.

Im guessing the drobo uses some proprietary form of raid 5 that allows for various disk sizes.