External RAID Enclosure Options

[Justin Molush]

Looking to upgrade my externals to a proper, redundant, external raid enclosure. So I would be looking at a RAID5 setup. This would be primarily geared towards editing FS700 RAW, XDCAM 50Mb, DSLR footage, and TIFF/DPX/OpenEXR as image sequences as needed (DPX and OpenEXR are rare but do occur a few times a year).

This will be using Windows, so eSata it is since USB3.0 is a turd and Thunderbolt doesn't exist for the most part. Does anyone have experience with CineRAID enclosures?

Newegg.ca - CineRAID CR-H458 Hardware RAID 0, 1, 10, 3 and RAID 5, support 4 x 3.5" Hot Swappable Drive Bays USB 3.0 eSATA RAID SubSystem

I would most likely be going in the direction of filling it up with 2TB hybrid drives. Anyone have experience?

[Adam Gold]

There seem to be tons of Thunderbolt solutions, at least when I searched NewEgg and B&H.

Here's something that looks pretty good:

http://www.bhphotovideo.com/c/product/1001226-REG/areca_arc_8050_8_bay_thunderbolt_raid_enclosure.html

If you are committed to eSata -- and that's cool -- take a look at this:

http://www.bhphotovideo.com/c/product/1001894-REG/istarusa_dage440t7_es_4_bay_3_5_sas_sata_enclosure.html

It appears to have four external eSata interfaces, one for each disk if I am interpreting this correctly, which I would think would give you better throughput than four disks sharing one pipeline, as on the one you linked to. This is how I have mine set up, although the specific one I have is no longer available, it appears. However, I could be very wrong about this assumption, as the website for a newer version of the enclosure I have says, in part:

The SeriTek/5PM only requires a single eSATA-to-eSATA "I-shape" connector cable (included) for supporting all five hard drive bays. This reduces cable clutter and allows the user to connect up to four SeriTek/5PM enclosures to a single 4-port SATA PM compatible host adapter.