It's no secret that we're smitten with Drobo's storage "robots." But they're expensive, especially compared to direct-attached or NAS storage devices built on a traditional RAID architecture. But if price is holding you back then you'll be happy to hear that for a limited time, you can take 20% off the list price of the 4-bay array. If you're lucky, you already have a handful of loose drives to plug-in else why not stuff it to capacity for 8TB of disk this Father's Day? Granted, still no built-in Ethernet without the optional DroboShare, but at least you've got an extra paper hundie to dry your tears.

Looks like Data Robotics just started up their Drobo Developer Community (DDC) and SDK program, kicking off on their eventual goal to let users develop their own apps and servers for their Drobo storage device. For the first "DroboApp" and proof-of-concept, they've already whipped up a working UPnP / DLNA server for streaming audio and video content directly from the Drobo to compliant devices (like the Xbox 360 and PS3, for example), and they hope the early beta offering will spur the community into developing drop-in servers for things like iTunes music and AFP, Rsync, FTP, web, BitTorrent, and anything else you can think up. (One Linux developer has already ported the Drobo Dashboard app to Linux using the SDK).

The DroboApps themselves are compiled for Linux, stored on the Drobo, added via drag and drop into a simple directory on the file system, and run on the Linux-based DroboShare hardware (meaning you won't be able to take advantage of DroboApps with a bare Drobo). Exciting stuff for the storage geeks in the house, especially those looking for some of the extensibility of Microsoft's Windows Home Server platform

So we snagged a DroboShare to hook our lonesome, directly-attached Drobo into. At $200 for what's essentially a USB network adapter we had some pretty high expectations, but thankfully we've been pretty impressed so far. Setup simply entails upgrading your Drobo hardware and Dashboard software to the latest versions (v1.1), restarting the box, and then plugging into the DroboShare. That's it. Detection, configuration, everything else is entirely automatic. Within a few moments it auto-mounts as a shared network drive via SMB, regardless of what file system the Drobo itself is running, or whether you're running Windows or Mac. (For those running on Linux or other operating systems, the DS is still accessible over your network via standard SMB share just like any other server.)

Click on for more on network auto-mounting and a couple speed tests.

The number one complaint about the Drobo is pretty obvious: getting the damn thing on your network without using a host computer. Well, consider that complaint sorted. Today Data Robotics is releasing a NAS upgrade for Drobo called the DroboShare, which will support:

• Gigabit Ethernet (yes!), static or dynamic IPs
• Auto-mounting SMB shares via Drobo Dashboard (supports SMB authentication)
  
• Dual USB 2.0 ports for two Drobos per DroboShare
  
• EXT3 file system support (officially!)
• Capacities up to 16TB per Drobo (provided you feed it 4TB drives that won't be out until, say, 2010)
• And possibly our favorite: email alerts, should a drive happen to crash, for example

It's also worth noting that Drobo is still capable of switching between NAS and direct-attached modes if you decide you want to take your Drobo OFF the network (but why would you do a thing like that?). The biggest problem with this add-on? It's $200, which brings the total cost of a DroboShare NAS rig to $700 -- without drives. Still, we have a feeling for many a Drobo user -- ourselves included -- the value of the functionality will far outweigh the borderline unreasonable price tag.