The Drobo is basically like a usb external drive, although I have heard a Ethernet connection is planned for the future, but right now you can only connect it to the PC via usb. The main feature of the Drobo are the four slots for hard drives and will work with any combination of drives capacity. Unlike and a raid setup or Windows Home Server if you put three 200gb drives and one 100gb drive it will assume the smallest hard drive of the four so it will think you have four 100gb drives. The Drobo on the other hand will see the difference in drives sizes.
The Drobo only takes drives with Sata interface, you can have 2 terabytes right now by putting four 500gb drives in the Drobo. When a drive dies you can take out the dead drive put in a new one and it will automatically rebuild the drives. The Drobo is a little pricey the unit itself without any hard drives cost 500 bucks, add in another few hundred for hard drives you could easily get up to 1000 dollars with a Drobo setup.
Windows Home Server is a lot less expensive and other advantages is it’s got Ethernet connection which will give you more flexibility, it supports Xbox streaming so you could basically leave your media on there and stream it to the TV through the Xbox, so your computer doesn’t even have to be turned on. If you are looking for a easy way to stream media than Windows Home Server is the way to go and Drobo is a good solution for backups.
They have a product called DroboShare which lets you share Drobo on an ethernet network. I bought one on the floor at MacWorld in January. Its sweet!
Thanks for mentioning Drobo share, Mark. I completely forgot about that.
The comment that Windows Home Server will assume the smallest drive of the 4 is the size of all 4 drives is incorrect. It works very much like drobo — you can add any size drive and it will add to the existing stoarge pool. The only difference is that, by default, it is treated like RAID 0 (no duplication), whereas drobo uses a RAID setting which allows some form of fault tolerance. Windows home server allows you to select which folders you would like to duplicate across drives.
I’ve seen someone have a WHS with 1 drive, and additional drives added via the drobo as an external USB… A bit expensive I thought, but seems good tho.
I’m skeptical about using drobo with windows home server.
Assuming you dont use the duplication feature of windows home server (since file duplication will be handled by the drobo). Theres a potential for data loss if the system drive fails since all the files stored on it will be lost if they have not been migrated on to the drobo.