clarifications about portable storage and raid

i am a photographer and am begining to deal with large amounts of data. i can, and have, in a single day come back with upwards of 30Gb worth of images. my computer is such that i am able to upgrade the internals to cope with this, and i will be building to around 1.5TB in a raid 5 array (this is at least the current path. my problem is that i also need backups of all of this. i have a multitude of portable hard drives, but i am growing tired of my system. i am looking to build an external system of backup hard drives that will accommodate at least 1.5TB. if possible i would like it to run without the lag of a normal usb or firewire drive. essentially i would like it to run at internal hard drive speeds.

i am still a little fuzzy on how i would do this. the external could employ raid 5 or simply be one large drive without redundancy, i am not as bothered as it will be a portable off site backup. is there a good way to do this as an enclosure, or would it need to really be like a second computer? i guess i am just having trouble thinking how i would consolidate the drives into a single drive and attach them to a computer such that i can achieve the speed i require. thank you very much.

oh, and i did search through the threads, i just came to a place where i need a little help understanding (i build systems regularly, i am just having issues with this).

joshua

Check out NAS on google. www.areca.com.tw has alot of good cards and info on there for you along with some cards that would probably work for what you are doing. You're going to want to do tape backups and keep them off site as this isn't the best solution in case of fire or what not but since you would have them somewhere else it would be pretty relieable. NAS has the speed you would want there are also other options. I need to get going though, i'll check back later.

the problem that i am having is that i would want it to operate at the speed of an internal hard drive. i have not used a nas device that would do this. if they are there, then i would gladly do that. i think what i am really looking for is something like this:

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Produc...82E16816111001

i would use it like a great huge portable hard drive. have two of them and an equivalent space inside the computer. i would have one attached and every few days switch it for one that was offsite (the place i keep my secondary is close enough to do that). that way i always have a backup less than 3-4 days old and i am only carrying one device. i hope that makes sense.

thank you.

joshua

You could use this ($290) with this cable ($30) and this controller ($245). That'd give you 4 external drives in raid, and room to plug another enclosure on at the same time if you buy another cable and box. There are also expander-based solutions, but their raid 5 implementations may be slow or incorrect.

thank you very much, this is a little bit more of what i was looking for. i am going to try to explain what i think is going on here. the enclosure puts out an sata multilane signal that goes to a mini sas connector at the raid controller. this then controls the enclosure and the raid setup. it is like running 4 sata cables back to a raid controller except more elegant. is this correct?

a few questions:
1. would this be as fast as an internal hard drive?
2. how compatible would this be with another controller? the purpose of the enclosure would be for constantly changing and updating offsite backup (i would love this networked, but that will not work). if the building burns i need to be able to pull off data. i hope that makes sense.
3. i was going to set it up in raid 5, but i was wondering how this would affect overall performance and, if required, compatibility with another controller. would it be better to go with another variety of raid?

thank you so much for helping me understand.

joshua

Originally Posted by jfkriege

thank you very much, this is a little bit more of what i was looking for. i am going to try to explain what i think is going on here. the enclosure puts out an sata multilane signal that goes to a mini sas connector at the raid controller. this then controls the enclosure and the raid setup. it is like running 4 sata cables back to a raid controller except more elegant. is this correct?

Exactly. The multilane cable acts just like normal internal sata cables, but it's neater than 4 separate cables running from the card to the enclosure.

Originally Posted by jfkriege

1. would this be as fast as an internal hard drive?

Yes. The cables, the signaling, the drives - are all just as fast as they would be mounted inside your computer. If you make a raid 5 array out of the drives (I'd recommend it, to prevent data loss in the event of a single disk failure and create a single volume out of the drives for easier management) it will impact the speed of the array, but it's not certain whether it'd be a positive or negative change.

Originally Posted by jfkriege

2. how compatible would this be with another controller? the purpose of the enclosure would be for constantly changing and updating offsite backup (i would love this networked, but that will not work). if the building burns i need to be able to pull off data. i hope that makes sense.

It'd be compatible with any Highpoint card. I believe the raid array configuration is stored on the disks, so you could plug that array into any other Highpoint 2000 series card and have it work. I'd test this before I believed it, but it should work.