Pros: Nice setup, OK interface. It performed as advertised.

Cons: Until after a month when all the drive lights went red. No access via iscsi or their dashboard. Call tech support and they open a case and step me through some very basic diagnostics. It still will not boot with drives in it. Now the case has to go to tier 2 support. The ETA for a response from them is 48 hours.
So after waiting the two days an email arrives asking me to boot it in their equivalent to Safe Mode. The Drobopro still just displays red lights, so I email them back the results. No response after two hours so I call. They tell me my tech support person has gone home for the day and will email me in the morning…. I tell the tech that is not acceptable so he has the other tier 2 tech look over my case and call me back. Our conversation lasted about five minutes with him telling me that it will need to go to tier 3 tech support. I ask how many tiers are there? He responds 3, so it sounds like I might be getting somewhere. My next question is: When will I hear from them? He re

Other Thoughts: In 18 years of IT this is some of the worst tech support I have ever had the joy of experiencing.

Pros: They made an effort to even make the packaging look nice. I was amazed at how simple it was to get all the drives in. You just push them into the slots -- no screws, no drive caddies, etc. Once you set it up via USB and configure ISCSI, you can manage the entire thing over iSCSI. With 8 2TB drives and dual data protection (can suffer two drive failures), I get about 10.5TB of space.

Cons: Minimal linux support. Because the device needs to know the filesystem in order to properly store your data, the freedom of iSCSI doesn't apply as you think it would. To begin with, they state that there is no official support from them for Linux. Second, you can't create a LUN over 2TB without being in risk at losing data. Third, you are discouraged from using LVM to combine all these 2TB LUNs into a single volume. Lastly, the device actually presents more space than you have available, relying on "notifications" to tell you when it is time to add more space.

Other Thoughts: While my "cons" list was quite long compared to the "pros", most, if not all, of the issues can be fixed with firmware upgrades.

Pros: Very fast. It was able to write at near 100% of the theoretical max for gigabit iscsi for over 10 minutes (108 MB/sec) with only half of the bays populated with "green" drives. Would be interested to see what it could do with Jumbo Frames enabled rather than the standard 1500 MTU that I tested it at. Easy to manage. Tools for linux are available and Data Robotics assisted in their creation so they are safe. VMWare ESX/ESXi certified. NTFS Volumes for Win Vista/7 and Server 2008/2008 R2 can be 16 TB and HFS+ volumes for OSX 10.5-6 can also be 16 TB. Allows over subscription on provisioning so when it's time to add storage, you just add/replace an existing drive and, you have more storage available w/o needing to resize your partition/LUN. Pretty resilient to power and networking events.

Cons: Only 1 iSCSI target can be connected at a time so not a SAN replacement device. Doesn't support EXT4 yet so you can't have 1 16TB EXT4 LUN, you need to create a bunch of 2 TB EXT3 LUNs (I hope Data Robotics will fix this with a firmware update). Can't configure a gateway address so you need to have layer 2 connectivity between the devices.

Other Thoughts: For single purpose storage it's hard to beat the price to performance of this device. The magic that makes it work seems well enough designed that I don't need to know what it's doing. I am interested in seeing what the new DroboEite can do with it's dual gigabit iSCSI connections. We are using ours as a data backup repository for servers and workstations though a managed backup server.

Pros: Easy to use and the most disk space for its size. The build quality is amazing.

Cons: For the price there really needs to be a droboshare built-in. Also the rack mount kit is way too expensive. Really guys that $200 for rack mounts is ridiculous.

Other Thoughts: I am runnning this as a NAS/SAN with 8 2T hard drives connected to an Atom barbone server with two gigabit NICs. One used for iSCSI and the other used for sharing the drobo on the network. it works very well. Again I think that for the price that there should be a droboshare built-in.

Pros: 8 bays, support for 2TB drives, fast interfaces, multiple levels of protection including dual redundancy.

Cons: We'll see if its fast enough to give those interfaces any point...

Other Thoughts: The Ethernet port is iSCSI *only*, best used to directly connect the device to a computer or server. Not necessarily any improvement over FW800 if you have a fast card in a PCIe slot.

You could connect iSCSI through a switch but that adds a point of failure, the possibility of network congestion slowing throughput, and you'd still need some kind of metadata controller to have more than one machine access a partition. The Drobo Pro could be used as the shared disk for MS Server Cluster, but I'd want its' reliability well established before trying that.

It'll be interesting to see what speeds the Drobo Pro is capable of (even the new version of the smaller Drobo isn't particularly special in that department) and whether it could be used for video editing...

But if you need something affordable to serve data directly to a network look at something like Netgear's ReadyNAS line.