When i saw the 8 bay Drobo, i was excited.... until i saw the $1800 price tag. 8 Drives under raid 6 with battery backup... it really did make me think, but it uses it's own custom raid type solution for storage, which seems to work well, but it's designed as a Desktop Area Storage, rather than a Network device (but it can be used on a network), so its throughput suffers. But for this, 6 bays is good enough, 8TB in Raid 6 (6 x 2TB drives minus 2 drives for RAID 6, if supported), all strapped onto a gigabit network (dual gigabit would be nice), i'm guessing $1200-$1400 with partial populated drive bays (4TB maybe), but i would like to be wrong and have it for less.
I really do like the idea of NAS's in general. As the amount of storage goes up, it gets harder to keep track of it, so having a single device that you can save everything to (backed up with a second - similarly configured device), it just makes things so much easier. I have 4 hard drive, 2x500GB, 1x1TB and 1x1.5TB, and i'm storing about 2.2TB worth of data on the lot. It's now getting to the point whereby i'm forgetting where i put stuff, since as one fills up, i have to move stuff over to another drive etc, i lack hardware support for raid 5 and i'm not confident in a software RAID solution. So a multi-bay NAS is looking very enticing to me. I looked at 2 bay NAS's, then thought, i'd fill that up in no time. 4 Bay, much better, can run RAID 5, gives me a single drive redundancy, but then i'm left with 3 drives of storage, so not much better than a 2 bay. 5 Bay's are a good compromise, but then as you increase the number of drives, failure starts to become more of a problem. So 6 bays with Raid 6, giving 4 drives of storage and double redundancy.... yup, that's a lot more interesting to me.
EDIT:
And my dreams have been partially shattered.... It's not a 6 bay (should have looked at the picture more closely). It's a 4 bay + 2 eSATA connections. On the up side, it has gigabit, 1GB ram, 256-bit AES encryption and hot-swap.
