NAS enclosures VS Drobo VS ? Help!

Hey guys, i am about to plunk down some serious cash because i need Space. I am an HD fiend and after filling up a couple of externals with quick and relative ease, im not buying anymore, because i dont want to start chain-linking externals, etc. 2 questions.
1. NAS enclosures, which one would you all recommend? Ive looked at the readynas NV+ and also, ( as titled ) the Drobo FS. also just the regular 4 bay drobo that is not networked. The readynas scares me as it has numerous reviews of failure.
2. Best route 2 go to prevent data loss? As i said im doing this only to store media ( which i stream to my WDTV Live Hub ) , so data loss would be catastrophic. Something i should use even instead of NAS?

Any help appreciated. Thanks in advance.

You'll find bad reviews of every product, but some seem to have more that others. The Drobo has a lot of fans, but it's kind of expensive. If you haven't already you might want to check out "smallnetbuilder.com", since they have a lot of reviews of NAS products and a user forum that seems pretty active. The usual recommendation to combat data loss is to do backups, which may still be a good idea, but it sounds like you really want reliable and secure availability of your data and a RAID-like product would appear to be a good fit for that. I'd probably also include a good UPS and surge protector to help eliminate power issues as a cause of data loss, but I think a NAS is about the best solution you're going to find. I'd definitely go with at least a 4-drive model, and I'd prefer one that supported hot swappable drives in case of drive failure, but that's more of a convenience feature rather than a necessity.

HTH

I use a readynas pro pioneer and I've been really happy with it. It's much faster than the Drobo's and the support has been wonderful.

A couple tips. Don't buy anything that doesn't support dual redundancy. That includes the ReadyNAS NV+ and 4 disk drobos. Single redundancy will protect for a single drive failure, but if a drive fails when replacing a drive from a failure or increasing the storage capacity your data is at risk. If one drive fails during that process ALL your data is gone. (Those times can be as long as a day or more with current drive sizes). That can make these even a little more risky then just using separate drives. I would only buy something that has dual redundancy or raid 6 on the readynas boxes (that would be the pro pioneer).

That means that two of your disks won't be usable for data. On the Drobo FS that's 2 disks for backup and 3 for storage, 2/6 for the DroboPro FS and 2/4 for the Pro Pioneer. For me the 5 disks of the Drobo FS isn't enough, so I went with the Pro Pioneer. The DroboPro FS isn't bad, but it costs about twice what the Pro Pioneer does and I couldn't justify that cost.

For my really important data (photos/etc) I plug a USB disk into the Pro Pioneer and use their backup software to make a daily backup of my photo volume to the USB drive. You can also use it just as storage or for printers. I'm not sure if Drobo supports that, but it was a good use of the external drives I was replacing, and now that I upgraded the drives from 1TB to 2TB I've put a couple of the old drives in enclosures and use them for backup. Email alerts and everything work great too.

As far as reliability I've heard of more people having problems with Drobo, but maybe their software is better now. You'll read problems about both. In my opinion ReadyNAS has been more proven by businesses. I want to drive Drobo another year or two until I'm sure they've fixed the problems.