I think you’re abusing the work “proprietary”. While it’s true that you can’t just pop the drives into a totally different RAID subsystem. Many people have had issues getting data off of failed Drobo systems that would have been much easier with Linux MD RAID, where you can generally put the drives into another system and boot a live Linux DVD to access the data.
While I don’t personally own a Drobo, I did some research for work a while a go and the general consensus is that Drobo is very slow if you have more than one user accessing the data concurrently, especially considering how expensive they are. OK for casual home use but not sufficient for an office environment or demanding home use situations. The reviews I looked at said there were better offerings for the money, especially FreeNAS. Yes it takes more configuration, but it also gives the best bang for the buck.
I think the main downfall of the various NAS solutions is that none of them that I’ve seen provided a good back solution. If users are putting the only copy of their data on a RAID’ed NAS thinking they are going to be safe because of RAID, they are going to be sorrily disappointed when something fails (other than a single drive) or they accidentally delete something and have no true backup. It’s like you’re supposed to buy two of the things in case one fails or you delete something.
TL;DR RAID alone is not a backup solution. You need more than one copy of your data.
“Other RAIDs will only let you know a drive has failed, but it is up to you to tell it what to do.”
You’ve never heard for hot spares?
I’m mostly taking the time to reply to you because your post looks like advertising copy for Drobo.
