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Meh.

Who's going to pay the Drobo premium when equivalent or better performance can be had, with more a bog-standard (e.g. reliable) hardware and filesystems, for less?

I guess those customers who care about the visual aesthetics of their NAS device.

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You're ignoring the real benefit of Drobo: mixing heterogeneous drives. Unfortunately, the cost of that feature is now really high, since it seems like regular RAID has gotten faster and cheaper while Drobo has stayed expensive and slow.

Exactly. Despite reliability and batch/lot issues with drives of vastly different SMART error rates and ages, the KEY Drobo feature appealing to the "lower end" of the RAID prosumer space WAS heterogeneous drives.

In the current market, Drobo has managed to price themselves OUT of that space while simultaneously NOT keeping up with performance on the higher end.

Drobo is now in the uncanny-valley of proprietary RAID systems.

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