I am a geek, and have always had some sort of external storage for my computers (indeed, when I started with computers, ALL storage was external… think about that!). These days I use and am a huge fan of Synology’s DiskStation NAS drives. Taking off from where Drobo faltered, these units allow you to put disks of varying sizes in them and are accessible from the network. Synology also has their DiskManager software there to run them, and this has it’s own “App Store” type of experience where you can install all KINDS of apps right on your DiskStation. I run an iTunes server, a file server (of course), a PLEX server, a Time Machine server, a VPN, and more. It’s NAS done right, and though you can get very geeky with it, you don’t have to be a geek to make excellent use of this. I currently use a DS1019+, but all of their units are excellent in their own rights.