Comment DIY (Score 1) 517
I researched Drobo, and found it to waste too much space, not to mention that the network add-on is expensive...and then reduced to usb transfer rates...
I have a Buffalo on my desk, and it is ok, but if you need speed, that isn't a way to go.
I found that I could buy a real RAID card and roll my own RAID NAS with little trouble and get great speeds out of it.
Later I purchased a micro board, it has 6 sata ports, and I have a Software Raid running on Ubuntu server, with all the necessary bits for SAMBA, XFS, CIFS, etc. I have 6 disks all in raid and a Gigabit ethernet...faster than anything I have purchased previously...does a good job too...