Here’s some first impression about my experiences with the Drobo.

I purchased the Drobo (v 2.0) with a DroboShare controller (embedded Linux box that exports the Drobo to your network).  It has a third-party NFS server on it but it doesn’t work very well.  I tried the Samba exporting on windows and it works great, but mounting via CIFS on Linux kinda sucks and has frozen a normally stable linux machine more than once.  However, the Drobo *does* make a fantastic rsync server.  It’s fast, it’s stable and you can do most everything over rsync that you could want to do with any other protocol except for edit a file or something like that.  It’s great for backups and great overall.  The theoretical full size of it can be 16TB, but I’ve got a 1TB and a 500GB drive in it now and it’s allowing me 500GB of usable space.  The logical volumes are 2TB, but I’m guessing that the Drobo will go into non-stable mode (and will ask me to insert another drive) if I exceed the 500GB that it’s got mirrored on the two drives.  I love that all drives don’t have to be the same size (take that ZFS) and that it tells me when a drive is failing and when it’s time to go out and buy a new/larger drive to add capacity.  So-far it’s very stable and fast enough to do most operations.

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