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I really like the concept of the Drobo, I just don't like the speed. I want the redundancy and easy upgradeability of the Drobo, but faster. I would love to be able to build something on my own. ZFS seems like a good place to start, but it has either upgradeability or redundancy (RAIDZ) but not both.

To clarify, I want to be able to have an array of disks which are expandable by just adding a drive and have redundancy built in.

I found instructions for making zfs act like a Drobo, but they are quite complicated and upgrading is a lot of work. Has anyone automated something like what is described there? Is there a different file system I should be looking at?

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I'm really not sure its going to be possible to answer this, but at the very least, you'll need to define what precisely you mean by "Drobo-like functionality". – RobM Apr 14 '12 at 7:05
I think he's referring to the "add disks of any size, on the fly" JBOD functionality of Drobo. – ewwhite Apr 14 '12 at 7:44
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Might I ask how this is off-topic? I'm trying to understand ZFS which is a server technology. – Steve Rowe Apr 14 '12 at 21:14
Look into greyhole. It provides redundancy and easy expandability to any size disk – Grant Jun 10 '12 at 12:38

closed as off topic by SvW, WesleyDavid, RobM, Khaled, Shane Madden Apr 14 '12 at 8:07

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What are you trying to accomplish? If you use ZFS, you would ideally use identical drive types/sizes. RAID mirrors tend to be more flexible than RAIDZ. ZFS isn't inherently faster than the Drobo; that depends heavily on your ZFS design.

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