Originally Posted by philbaum 
Only problem was that it took 17 hours to back up my 200 gigabytes of images.
It's because USB 2.0 is horrible for transferring lots of data. Even though they claim their speed is more than firewire, even lowly firewire400 is lots faster. I have an external drive for backups and using firewire to back up my windows partition take 20min but using the usb2.0 port on the same drive takes hours
The Drobo is a fairly simple to use redundant data store if you don't want to muck around w/ Linux too...