I wanted one for my growing media collection at home and another one attached to our file server for network backup at the office. The fan was a deal killer in terms of using it at home. But the data loss horror stories I read led me to hold off purchasing one for the office as well.
When I buy hard drives I typically buy two and mirror them. I like Drobo on paper because it's a single device that holds and manages up to four hard drives. If you fill it with four or even just two drives and one fails you're totally covered. However, as I've since learned from intrepid early adopters, if Drobo itself fails, you might be totally screwed. I think it depends what Drobo is doing with your data when it fails. Some people have experienced no data loss whereas others have lost everything.
So I think I'll wait for version 2. (Having never used a Drobo, the above is not a review. I'm simply reporting on what I've read in user forums.)
While no other company has released anything as slick and user-friendly as Drobo, Hitachi recently got my attention with its new 1 TB (1,000 GB) hard drive. Even better, Hitachi has placed this drive into a fanless external USB 2 enclosure. It's currently on sale at Best Buy for $307, which seems like a good price given that no other company has a 1 TB hard drive yet (though other companies sell this Hitachi drive in their own enclosure).
Two of these hard drives mirrored should work for my media collection at home, but what about on-site network backups at the office? Which storage hardware does your office use? Do you use Drobo?
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