Incredible work!!

But, it is NOT and should not be compared to a Mac Pro.

Too bad it uses GMA500. if it had GMA950 or Ion, it would be a great client for hackintoshing.

$1500 is too expensive. Two fully populated 4-bay Firewire 800 Drobos are a much better value.

That being said, I love my Drobos. Not fast by any measure, but does what it was advertised to do and does it well.

The ability to expand the array one drive at a time.
The ability to mix and match all sorts of drive brands and sizes.

That's Drobo's advantage.

As far as I know, none of those offer the upgradability that the Drobos do.

I'd use it take pictures of things to sell on ebay.

I have two Drobos and, so far, they have performed as advertised. I even test it by pulling a drive from one of them and inserted another to see how the rebuild would go. After it finished, I pulled replaced another drive. Everything worked as it should. The rebuilds took quite a bit of time, but not much different from other RAID 5 rebuilds that I've seen. Overall, I'm very happy with the Drobos.

In regards to this deal, personally, I would look for good prices on two regular Drobos (they can be found for around $320 each now) and use the money saved to buy drives to fill them.

Want!

I can see your point but for people who value all of their data, this method requires more work and will use more drive space than RAID 5.

Do these things have any redundancy in case of drive failures?