eSATA driven external Hard drives
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As usual, storage technology is moving at incredible speed. Here's a The Register review of Lacie's eSATA 1 terabyte system. If you've ever dealt with the headaches caused by very large backups, > 100 gigabytes, this is going to be very good news to you. Check out the Lacie product page.

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Our review model shipped with two 500GB Hitachi Deskstar drives inside. These are hot-swappable - there are no caddies as the SATA standard is hot-swap by design

and, to make it even better, you can finally get affordable HARDWARE raid:

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There's also a small switch on the back that allows you to set the built-in RAID controller to various modes, along with a small button that activates the new mode. The different settings are RAID 0 (written as Fast), RAID 1 (Safe), Big and JBOD
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Most motherboards use software raid of one form or another, this sounds like the real thing, you'll plug this in and your system will see a single drive.

This is really good news, I was wondering what would happen when a client I have jumped over the current 300 gigabyte backup setup we have running. And when their requirements moved beyond the current internal 300 gigabytes mirrored raid setup. Now there is a solution that should be easy to implement and reasonably cheap, as these these things go.

And if you have clients that deal with massive amounts of information, but have low budgets, this is likewise very good news.

Read more on eSATA specifications.

And since you probably don't have eSATA attachments on your system:

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Sure, there are some limitations of what you can connect an eSATA drive to, but LaCie has already thought of this one and kindly bundles a PCI-X 133 eSATA card with the Two Big. This offers four eSATA ports and is backwards-compatible with 64- and 32-bit PCI slots.

Note that's a pci express card, not a pci card. But you can get a pci adapter card too.

I've had nothing but problems with external firewire drives, and this sounds like the ideal solution. I'm definitely not buying another external usb/firewire drive again unless I need to exchange data with other people. For local use, this is absolutely going to solve all my backup issues.

Other manufactorers
Thermaltake has an interesting case + pci card combo. That's SATA 2 compliant, which means an external hard drive with upto 3 gigabits per second transfer.
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