Although I have not had a chance (yet) to run it through it’s paces it looks like Drobo “The World’s First Storage Robot” is going to make things a lot easier for me and everyone to manage your storage. Here are a few bullet points that make it attractive:

• Fully automated storage you don’t have to manage.
• Drobo guards everything on it.
• Drobo combines up to four hard drives into a big pool of protected storage.
• Drobo upgrades capacity on-the-fly.
• Add drives to Drobo at any time.
• Drobo works the way you do.
• Drobo lets you “pay as you grow”
• No RAID levels.
• No management or configuration.
• Drobo does everything for you.

Drobo is the world’s first storage robot, providing fully automated, infinitely expandable storage that safeguards against drive failure and data corruption.
Fully automatic protection: Drobo is self-healing; when a hard drive fails, it reconfigures data to ensure it is once again protected - all without any human intervention.
Infinitely expandable capacity: Drobo is self-improving; just add a new drive, or upsize a smaller one, and you’ll instantly increaseoverall protected capacity without needing to do anything else.
Effortless storage management: Drobo is self-aware, knowing where your data is and how to heal or improve itself in the event of trouble - Drobo takes the pain out of managing large amounts of data.
System requirements: Apple Macintosh OS-X 10.4 or greater, Microsoft Windows 2000, 2003, XP or Vista.

Drobo was designed to take the pain out of making your data forever accessible. Drobo does the heavy lifting of drive monitoring and data protection so you don’t have to.

Drobo acts as a large, single pool of storage. One of its biggest benefits is the ability to provide massive storage that is always available and not spread across multiple disks. That makes it best for use as “primary” storage, not merely a high capacity location for periodic backups or archived data.

Now you can keep all your data close at hand because in addition to being always available, it’s also inherently “backed-up” on the Drobo and protected against drive failure or disk corruption.

I will post more on the system, soon as mine arrives. But in the mean time, do some research and check out the ‘Drobo in Action Video” and the Drobo community forums.

Here’s another article about Drobo:

Gort! Klaatu barada nikto! by ZDNet’s Robin Harris — Translation: protect Klaatu’s home videos! Meet Drobo, what his inventors call the world’s first storage robot. It is an important step in the consumerization of IT: a storage array that manages storage protection and capacity so you don’t have to. Drobo is a USB black box that stores and protects your data about as effortlessly as [...]

See demo video here