I can't speak for Drobo with a Mac - but mine works great with Linux. I was going to get a DroboShare, but then decided just to use an old server to network the storage. It's slow to spin up but fast until you start to fill the drives - once you get to about 95% usage things really start to slow down for some reason. I have not had noise issues either but have noticed the relatively quiet fan does come on fairly often. Combined with Tarsnap, I've basically stopped worrying about data.