There have been a couple of requests to talk about what the difference is between the drobo, a lacie, and a raid machine. First, let me talk about the things they generally have in common.
The drobo, lacie and raid, are all generally external drives that you can connect via a firewire, usb, and sometimes even a network connection. They usually act as additional drives that you can store massive amounts of media on for backup, storage, or portable storage.
The lacie drives are generally good for media files that you dont really care about losing. The reason I say this is because if the drive in the lacie dies, you’re pretty much SOL (shit outta luck!). There’s no redundancy, meaning, the content is all stored on one drive and not backed up on another drive. If it dies, you’re poopooed (that’s the technical term 
).
With a RAID drive and lacie drive, there’s a difference. The content is usually spread across multiple drives so that you if one drive fails, the other drives have some data in reference to that drive so you can restore the content when you buy a new drive for it. This is called data striping. The drobo uses proprietary software to handle this and RAID systems use the RAID data striping algorithms to handle this (RAID 5, 6, 10).
So why do I prefer Drobo over RAID? Well the biggest reason I love my drobo is because I can use different size drives in my drobo. This is the biggest benefit to using a Drobo over RAID. Most RAID system require you to have 5 drives (or 6) of the same size. So once you run outta space, you have to figure out what to do with the data on your drives while you’re upgrading drives. This is typically a massive pain in the ass. With the drobo, all you need to do is strip out a drive, then replace it with a new one of a bigger size. That’s it. I even started with drives of varying sizes. It’s not the most optimal use of the drive space, but the point was that I could use all my drives without having to buy drives of all the same size.
In the end I would recommend this product over a RAID system or a Lacie drive. It’s just that much simpler to use. It is a bit pricey at about $360, but I haven’t had any issue with my data, and I feel pretty comfortable using it alone as my backup. Feel free to email if you have any questions!
