There's a lot of good stuff in this thread.
My work flow.
All my raw files are stored on an 8 bay, 3Tb/bay Drobo. 24T. I'm 80% full and I'm not noticing a "slow down"
Drobo is only used for storage, not working on files.
I have a 250Gb scratchdisk for CS6
All my retouching and editing work ends up on my main drive (1T, MacPro) and when finished goes to Drobo and one other extermal 4Tb RAID which stores CS6 files only. Once full, that drive gets replaced. My main drive gets cleaned off when I reach about 800Gb.
Once a quarter all my files, PSD and original digital or scanned film files are backed up on drives that are stored in my office in a sizable suitcase, 7 miles from my studio. This is a process that can take a few evenings of my time ;-) I acutally wish I could afford a second Drobo or similar at this time for easier maintenance rather than lugging around the suitcase but that's another story.
Backing up on a single device, RAID or not, is not considered a viable back-up strategy in my mind. Hard drives do fail and we believe we are safe with RAIDs. Sometimes we are. Power supplies fail and are capable of wiping out multiple hard drives in a RAID. Control boards fail and restripe/wipe parts or all from your RAID (Had this happen on a Buffalo RAID ... operating system bug, all data lost on the RAID ... I did have a back-up at the office ... )
YMMV
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