I'm still strongly considering the DroboPro. Even at half the price it's still pricy, but I don't really see any way around that. There's really no competition and rolling your own is not even remotely possible if trying to achieve a similar level of integration and elegance.

The other negative is the collection of poor reviews. Balanced of course by positive reviews. It might be one of those scenarios where you have to test it all out yourself.

I'm looking at stuffing two existing 1.5TB drives into it along with two new ones to start. Then I'll use my existing RAID1 box with a pair of smaller drives to back up some of the Drobo (my music for now).

Once you get going with this type of storage solution you start to realize you need a lot more storage than you had originally anticipated. Having a second Drobo with identical drives for use as backup for instance...