[Pat Ostman]

Alex,

Thank-you again for your insight.

Unless I misunderstand your explanation of how the enclosures work, I can get a card with an internal and external mini-SAS port and lose little long term flexibility provided I assure I buy an enclosure that acts as a SAS-Expander vs just a “dumb” enclosure.

So my plan – today – is:

1. Buy a card and 4 3TB disks for use internally. Accepting this will not give me the best performance over the long term, but it will improve the < 45mb/s I am now seeing.

2. Buy an 8 or 12 bay external unit, or 2 8’s chained together for use as working storage set probably with 2TB drives. Once this step is complete, I’ll use the internal set as time-machine and bits and pieces storage.

3. Use a Synology 4 or 5 bay unit for off-site (building) backup.

I’m split between the Areca 1882lp and the ATTO 644. The Areca seems to be better value, has more cache, etc. Reading posts here and other groups show both have strong and not so strong points.

[Pat Ostman]

Alex,

Thanks for your comments. I am curious about the Areca issues. Are they long standing or related to the recent release of Mountain Lion?

Would an internal raid 6 be a reasonable interim solution until I build out into an external enclosure? I am trying to determine a quick ramp up starting point.

Broader questions based on your input.

Is it best to get a card with multiple SAS external connectors or can the drive enclosures be daisy chained off 1 port. I read somewhere that and 8 bay enclosure would require 2 SAS cables back to the Mac Pro. But it is unclear if this is a card requirement or an enclosure req.