This was one of the things that really drove me to get a Drobo back in the day. I liked the idea that I could effectively just throw hard drives in it and it would run. And run it did. Slowly, but it worked!
Drobo looks cool. That is the idea with gaia. Right now our master branch allows you to docker-compose-up and use the admin api calls to configure "disk" to however you want.
The main motivation here was regardless of what images were deployed on optional cloud host providers, the default was set to local disk to support users actually owning this data locally.
Additionally, we support a variety of other drivers, like azure blobs, etc.
It is nice that the hubs are set up to interact with an API where developers by default are storing data in this decentralized way.
I will check out Drobo more.
"Slowly, but it worked!" making things work is important! haha