Both are nice options. I wonder if I should look into purchasing the enclosure separate from the drives. I don’t recall where, but somewhere I found a hardware raid-5 enclosure that had eSata, Firewire 800 and Firewire 400 interfaces and was portable. I think it was a 5 drive enclosure.
So if I have this right, a 5 drive enclosure configured as a raid-5 will allow me to continue working if just 1 drive fails? Am I correct in assuming with a raid-5 that I lose the storage capacity of 1 (out of the 5 drives) to parity?