I'd need a windows system to put it in. The Drobo isn't upgradable beyond stuffing more drives in it, and the laptop is an old hp craptop...
I've got a second desktop that's got usb3 (drobo is usb3), so that'd probably improve things, just not by a lot (pretty sure the slowdown is in the samba share, but I need to do more testing and see where exactly the issue is), and I kinda want to keep that system free for other experiments.