Here's why for the Drobo:

1. Hot Swappable Storage. Pull dead drives, or small drive and instantly swap them out with larger, working drives all while still able to access data (playing video from the Drobo without skipping).

2. Mixed Storage sizes which you don't get with RAID. RAID requires same size drive per slice or you only get aggregate of the smallest size slice. Drobo supports any size per slice.

3. Automatic format/setup of each new hard drive. Drobo autocorrects bad sectors(marking off) while maintaining your data integrity using the redundant data features of the Drobo. Also if a drive dies, it'll alert you and you just swap the drive out without interrupting any work you're doing. RAID would require you to rebuild without any access (or limited access) to the data in the interim and the RAID rebuild could take hours.

I don't think a $300 midsize pc with limited storage could do all that...

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1) You can get SATA hot-swap cages for a PC if you so wish. (Example, not necessarily a recommendation: [www.newegg.com] ). SATA is also, generally speaking, natively hot-swappable.

2) True, but why would you buy HDDs in a random fashion anyway? And BTW - it's physically impossible to have full data redundancy with, let's say, a 1.5 TB drive and 2x 250 MB drives. So you can mix, but only to a point. And the more "mixed" the drive array is, the less efficient it will become, especially if drives die and are replaced with different sizes. The array will become fragmented (a la disk fragmentation), and the CPU will need to work ever harder to keep track of/retrieve all the data.

3) Formatting or otherwise initializing a disk properly (e.g. not Windows "quick format") under any OS will mark bad sectors and not use them. Windows RAID and Linux RAID (md) let you continue working if a drive dies, though I will grant that you have to take some additional action at the OS level to bring a new disk online and add it to the RAID set.

4) I concur that you couldn't do a 6-disk-capable (as the Drobo is bare-bones, we'll forget about the cost of the disks) file server for $300. Figure $300 for a decent P4 machine with 2GB RAM and a large case. $120 for 2 3-disk hot-swap cages (e.g. [www.newegg.com] ), and $50 for a couple of additional SATA cards, working in JBOD mode (as the OS will handle RAID). Linux for $0.

So in fairness, ~$500 for a decent bare bones file server.

To me, the $800 savings is worth the little bit of extra time and learnin' to use a PC. Then, of course, you also have the advantages of using a PC and can offload your virus scanning to the server, have the server handle automated backups, etc.

Plus I wager that in a speed test, you'll get faster results from a well-built file server than from a Drobo.

All that being said, I understand the ease of use argument and the argument is fair. I just want to make the point that the ease of use alone is costing you about $800. So if it took you 8 hours to set up and manage the file server, in effect you'd be making $100/hr for your time. :)

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$575 for the file server, and a savings of $725. Still totally worth it, IMO.

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