http://www.drobo.com/Products/FAQs.php#9

It is also an issue considering that Drobo was only USB 2.0 at the time of intial setup. This solution is ESATA so the working speed is equivalent to that of an internal drive. As well you do have the option to use the drives in RAID 0, 1, 5, 10 or JBOD. Drobo is pretty much RAID 5 and that’s it. You also can still add up to two more cases and the RAID card can still support the multiple drives with out performance decrease. Drobo is FW800 so the more cases you put on the Firewire Bus the decrease in speed you experience. Unless you add Firewire 800 cards internally. the RAID card is really the crux of the whole solution. It is a HighPoint RocketRAID card. Very solid.

Don’t get me wrong…Drobo is slick. I would love to have one simply for the ability to mix and match drives. It is just a pretty closed box solution that doesn’t give you the future ability to grow into an enterprise type level solution.

I do have to say though that as a possible offsite remote backup solution it could be useful with DroboShare. But if you are changing chunks of data in excess of 5GB in a couple of days your bandwidth needs to rsync something like that could be HUGE!

The way I would have perhaps gone, is getting two Drobos and use a tool like rsync, or some other data syncing tool to keep the drobos in sync with each other.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rsync
There are many versions of rsync for windows as well as OSX and Unix/Linux.
(or if you have droboshare, rsync server can run right on the box itself! http://tinyurl.com/6j6ayl )

What you do is keep one Drobo offsite, and keep the other onsite. Then once a week or so, bring the other one in and rsync them (or if you have the bandwidth, do it remotely). Kris can probably add a bit more to that end, since he has a drobo and has had the chance to mess around with it more than I have.

There are quite a few people it would seem that are using rsync with their Drobos
http://tinyurl.com/65wmzc

Also, there are Droboapps now that greatly extend the features of these units!
http://www.drobo.com/droboapps/

Let me first start off by saying that I’m not much on the techie end of things as far as my knowledge goes with RAID and what not. I leave that business up to my buddy Daniel @ crucedesign.com to advise me ;).

I do recall a few things that made us choose what we did. Blog post is titled “New(ish)”… When we actually put this system in play the drobo was one of the first systems we looked at. However, the drobo (at that time) was only usb 2.0 and that was our biggest turn off. For a working file system that was going to be wayyy too slow. I also had a big concern about it being a proprietary system. If i had issues and i needed support I would need to deal specifically with drobo. It also wasn’t great for the redundancy I was looking for. Now i have 2 on site backups and one offsite.

I do use the cases I have now for other drive storage as well so the extra space is nice.

Also, I don’t plan on going over 2TB of working data any time soon, and I am aware that if I do I will need to set up my system a bit differently. I can expand by having a multiple drive setup as opposed to one big volume drive.

am i making any sense? I’d love to hear your thoughts..
Maybe Daniel can join us in this thread and shed a bit more light on his thoughts!