DroboElite - any comments?

Hi all,

We are looking at a more long term storage plan with the main focus being on capacity (and the ability to expand) and redundancy.
So far the DroboElite has caught my eye for these main points and most of all its low up front cost.
The main purpose for the Drobo would be storage of users work and shares – nothing intensive like hosting virtual disks.
We already have a number of 500Gb hard drives out of use since we migrated over to a virtual server environment so if I could save on buying new drives (as I would have to should I buy something branded like a HP array) that would be another benefit (especially considering there is nothing wrong with the spare drives I have).
So to that effect does anyone on here have any good/bad/ugly stories to tell of the DroboElite – a quick search reveals a few answers but nothing in detail.

Thanks,
James

We bought one of these in june to use with our vmware setup. We started out by using it as a storage device in vsphere and also attaching it directly to a couple of windows 2008 servers via iscsi initiator. Turns out it didn't like that and kept losing connection. So now we just use as vmware storage.

It also died in october and had to be sent to germany for repair under warranty. Something to do with psu, and not uncommon as i read on a couple of sites.

Overall, cool looking, with neat non-standard raid system, but not industry grade reliable. Fortunately we have an hp fibre san for our critical VMs. :)