External raid enclosure needed esata or ???

[scoobert]

Need this for backing up pictures and video files. NAS is to slow, USB seems to be too slow when I back up to an external USB 3 HD.

I was thinking of going to an esata type connection unless there is something that's a better/faster choice.

Will be running raid 1 or maybe raid 1/0. 3-5 drives and would like to stay under 500 for the box alone.

TIA for any

 

[rsq]

With that kind of budget, I would go for 4/8 drive SAS enclosure and SAS card.

Sample box:
Sans Digital TR8X 8 Bay SAS / SATA JBOD Storage Enclosure (Silver)

Card:
LSI MegaRAID 9280-8e MD2 8-Port Ext. 6Gb/s PCIe SAS SATA RAID Card

Cables (you'd need 2):
External Mini SAS 26P TO MINI SAS 26P 4x SFF-8088 to SFF-8088 Cable 3FT 1M

That setup would give you 48GBit/s to your storage. Way more then SATA can ever saturate.

I know the parts I listed are over 500$ in total, but I just took the first search results. If you're careful, you can find them cheaper.

 

[FnordMan]

/\ That. eSATA isn't going to be much faster as all of the multi-drive eSATA enclosures i've seen are port multipliers so you'll have <x> drives running over one cable.

 

[westrock2000]

The biggest practical benefit of eSATA is the OS treating the drive like a normal drive and not having to worry about the hassles of USB. You can use RAID, format as you want, everything behaves as normal.

 

[FnordMan]

The biggest practical benefit of eSATA is the OS treating the drive like a normal drive and not having to worry about the hassles of USB. You can use RAID, format as you want, everything behaves as normal.

External SAS is that and more, you'll get full bandwidth on all four drives and with the right controller firmware, it'll still look just like "a normal drive" to the OS.
Currently going through migration right now, haven't actually started the data migration yet but ~7.2TB over an eSATA v2 link is going to take a while... (the 300Mbits/sec one, have four drives in an eSATA port multiplier enclosure, they'll be migrated to internal later when the data shuffle is done)