The Drobo FS in-depth, Part 1: what it is, how it works

I've got my own sprawling collection of stuff, and since late 2007 I've been a user and evangelist of Windows Home Server, my favorite Microsoft product. Windows Home Server has two killer features: first, it will painlessly and automatically back up any Windows PC on your home network; and second, you can toss a bunch of differently sized hard drives into it and it will treat them all as a single usable glob of space. Microsoft accomplished the second feat with a technology they called Drive Extender. It uses some clever tricks and a specialized service or two to elegantly create the functional illusion of a single giant hard drive out of multiple hard drives, without the server administrator having to manage RAID groups or LUNs or any of the things that high-end servers and disk arrays need to approximate the same functionality. It was great. Over the years, I seamlessly grew my WHS from two terabytes of space on four 500 GB disks up to more than five terabytes on several mixed-size disks.