Question about Drobo and other Raid formats

I'm in the process of changing my back-up. I'm tired of stacking external hard drives, copies to DVD's etc. I know folks who back-up to tape for longevity purposes; however, I have been exploring the new "Raid" offerings on the market. Drobo is one plug and play version with built in proprietary software however, their software is required to retrieve the data/images. Other similar data storage exits at significantly less cost and similar features. I'm interested if anyone has experience with these versions of RAID and have any recommendations. There are several brands other than Drobo but I have found no comments on their performance/reliability. Does anyone use a RAID and if so, what configuration would you recommend for storage?

Bill, I have been using the Drobo pro which I bought last Fall. I have 6 slots filled with 2 available and 16tb capacity (i have 3 1tb drives and 3 2 tb drives).

The Drobo pro I found works best with the e-sata connection as the other connections I found too sluggish. But I love it. I use it as my primary backup. It has all my stuff on it with room to spare. I do have copies of the images on externals and stored in case of emergency. The pro has a raid option if you want redundancy, but it is better in that if one drive fails, you simply replace the drive rather than losing the whole system. If you have a raid/mirror set up on the drobo pro, then you're capacity is less, but you have the extra redundancy.

So I simply use the normal configuration on mine as one large storage unit. With the 9 TB I have currently installed, 6.14TB is available for storage of which I'm using 1.45 TB of backup.

Thanks, I'm seriously looking at Drobo but recently have come across RAID packages for half the price.

Drobo user here as well - Drobo's big advantage is that you can add drives as you need them with no other configuration required - not so for a lot of the raid array's (Have to take all the data off - add new drives - re-initilise and then put the data back on)
Drobo's not cheap - but then loosing my data is not a option.