I am desperate at this point, I have been looking for "Big storage" solution for a while on my own and I can't find anything that would suite my needs. But now push came to shove.

Current situation: I have about 6TB data storage (already full) - Drobo. Yesterday Drobo died on me and it put me into bad situation - I can't recover my data without buying another Drobo. From extensive research online I realized that Drobo is not the safest bet and by now it seems very poor choice. I ordered new Drobo to try to get my data back, however I don't want to be in the same situation later and continuing using Drobo promises this event to re-occur.

What I am looking for:

1) Inexpensive setup.

2) Dynamically extendable - add more drives and/or replace a drive with bigger capacity.

3) Redundant - setup against 1-3 drive failure, will depend on total number of drives. For the sake of argument let's assume for every 4 drives one should be able to fail without data loss.

4) Easy data recovery - let's say unforeseen happens, I would like to be able to recover information without buying new tools or replacements - example: new Drobo.

5) Should be USB or Network Attach Storage

6) No demand on speed. Doesn't have to be fast, I am not doing video editing on the setup. However if option exists, would be nice to have a decent speed.

After thoughts: I reviewed few options and FreeNAS looks nice, but it doesn't have #2 - Dynamic extendability. There are work around with Pools but it seems a bit complicated and unnecessary. More over it seems like data safety is a big question - saw some horror stories.

Please advise on what options I have and what seems like an optimal solution (if any). I don't care if it has to be Windows or Linux box or any other OS and/or software that has to run on top, but simple solution is more attractive.

Thank you!

P.S: Feel free to ignore "After thoughts".