only uses 10% of storage for up to two drives to fall over, totally interchangeable sotrage, no need to match sizes etc. Just trying to firgure out if it's worth it, thought no one was using them. you know a few people who are then?
Not true.
If you check out the calculator for capacities:
http://www.drobo.com/Products/drobolator.html
You'll see that if you have 2 * 250GB drives, you will get 231.2GB of storage space as 232.4GB is used for "protection" (i.e. parity data), but if you add a 3rd drive, it still uses about 232GB for protection.
If you notice from there, if you use mis-matched sized drives, you won't actually get the most out of it. i.e. if you use a 250gb and a 1tb drive, you only get the usable space of 2*250 drives (i.e. 250GB) and the rest is "reserved for expansion".
I would say that it's great for home use, but you won't get as much storage out of it as you thought you might, and for business use you might as well get yourself a proper raid array to use.
i'm pretty sure i'm getting one with x1 1.5tb hard drive, expand as needed i rkeon.
Very much a waste of time. If you check out the calculator you'll see that having a single 1.5TB drive in it will actually only give you 697.2GB of storage.
I would say, if you have multiple drives knocking around and only want an external drive for a single PC then it's pretty good. If you're going to buy all of the drives at the same time and you want multiple PC's accessing it, you're probably better off going with something like the QNAP devices as they act as true NAS.
