Yeah, I had a bad experience with a Thecus NAS a few years ago. Synology has been good to me. The reason I mention Drobo is that a friend who has an IT services firm swears by them. I like their "BeyondRAID" technology that lets you hot plug new drives of varying sizes without rebuilding the RAID array. But they are expensive - the cheapest one I can find with an ethernet port (instead of USB) is almost $1000.