The fastest and largest 2,5″ form factor solution (with spinning drives).

[David Roth weiss]

You didn’t say how you’re connecting your drives, but more importantly, you will never find a single spinning hard drive faster than the 200MB/sec you’ve already found. If you want faster throughout you’ll need a RAID with two or more drives striped together. A good rule of thumb to remember is, every time you double the number of drives in a striped set you effectively double the throughput.

David Roth Weiss
Director/Editor/Colorist & Workflow Consultant
David Weiss Productions
Los Angeles

David is a Creative COW contributing editor and a forum host of the Apple Final Cut Pro forum.

[Tim Jones]

I concur with David – more spindles = better speed.

You don’t mention how you wish to connect, but of you have a SAS HBA with an available port (4 channels), you could use something like this chassis from iStarUSA:
https://www.amazon.com/iStarUSA-SATA-Hot-Swap-Cage-BPU-350SATA-RED/dp/B003Y1DN38

Populate 1-4 of the bays with that Seagate drive and stripe them. You would then connect the ports on the back of the chassis to the SAS HBA Port with a cable like this:
https://www.amazon.com/CableCreation-External-26pin-SFF-8088-Cable/dp/B013G4EX9K

Or, if you can go to 3.5″ drives, you could use something like the SansDigital XR4T and get your storage out to 40TB and over 750MB/sec sustainable with Seagate’s 10TB enterprise class drives (we use a number of these in our lab).
https://www.amazon.com/Sans-Digital-TR4X-Storage-Enclosure/dp/B002AKKDBY/
https://www.amazon.com/Seagate-Enterprise-Capacity-Cache-Internal-ST10000NM0016/dp/B01DSRHFOK/

If you are limited by USB connectivity, you could use something like this as your chassis for 3.5″ drives:
https://www.amazon.com/Mediasonic-External-Drive-Enclosure-HFR2-SU3S2/dp/B003YFHEAC
Or This for 2.5″ drives:
https://www.amazon.com/Noontec-TerraMaster-D5-300-Enclosure-Support-Diskless/dp/B01DW1X348/

Tim
—
Tim Jones
CTO – TOLIS Group, Inc.
https://www.tolisgroup.com
BRU … because it’s the RESTORE that matters!

[Neil Sadwelkar]

The iStar HDD cage that’s mentioned by Tim is not an external device. It goes inside a PC cabinet and needs an SMPS to power it. and it uses 3.5″ drives.

For 2.5″ drives you could consider a 2.5″ RAID case from Akitio which has removable 2.5″ drives.
Like this one
Akitio Thunder2 Quad Mini
https://www.amazon.com/Akitio-TBQM-TIAA-AKTU-Thunder2-Quad-Mini/dp/B00VJ4IWVU/ref=sr_1_3?s=pc&ie=UTF8&qid=1487849110&sr=1-3&keywords=akitio

It has no RAID capabilities, however.

There’s the Promise Pegasus M4 which is tiny and supports 2.5″ SSDs and drives.
https://www.bhphotovideo.com/c/product/1046491-REG/promise_technology_p2m4hd4us_promise_pegasus2_4x1tb_t_bolt2.html

———————————–
Neil Sadwelkar
neilsadwelkar.blogspot.com
twitter: fcpguru
FCP Editor, Edit systems consultant
Mumbai India