What is it?
An enclosure for up to four bare hard disks that gives you lots of storage.
How much does it cost?
$335/£279
Why did I buy it?
I could have bought a big RAID system such as LaCie’s 4big for my media collection, but the problem with that is that it’s finite; once it’s full, you have to buy another, bigger drive and copy everything across. The Drobo system, though, lets you chuck in any old 3½″ SATA hard disks you have lying around, and it’ll present them to your Mac or PC as a single chunk of storage. It’s redundant; if one drive fails, your data’s still safe. (Just be sure to replace the failed drive as soon as you can!)
When it gets full, pop out the smallest drive and replace it with a larger capacity drive, and Drobo will remap your data automatically; the fringe benefit of this is that you can buy not-the-biggest-capacity-drives for cheaps, and use larger drives when the prices fall.
It’s not perfect; it can be a little slow, and there’s some silliness about having to define volume sizes from the start, but I’m happy to trade that for a system that’s redundant and allows for organic growth.
Where can you get it?
Loads of places; you can buy from Amazon.com or Amazon.co.uk, for example.
Recommended by chrisphin 1 year ago — 
