eSata 6GB/s

[Christoffer Glans]

I'm looking for a RAID similar to the Pegasus Promise RAID for thunderbolt, but for eSata 6GB/s instead. Keep in mind that I'm talking about the 6GB/s version (Sata III), not the 3GB/s version (Sata II).

Are there any out there? And if not (which seems to be the case) are there any USB3 Raid systems instead?

[L. Langer]

There are tons of USB 3 RAID towers if you want to go that route but eSATA is definitely better. That being said, there aren't really any SATA 3 options out there but if you want to go with SAS, there's plenty of choices there to keep you happy if you want that extra bit of oomph. Sans Digital has got plenty of options.

[Christoffer Glans]

It just seems as a clumsy way of having a RAID, the Promise drive you can take with you, even if it's big... it's that "plug and play" way that is needed, SAS seems so nailed to the floor.
Are there any very high performance USB3.0 RAIDs that really perform at it's maximum that you could link to? Professional hardware that is. (always funny to see a little 5600 rpm external drive with USB3... I mean, what's the point?)

[L. Langer]

You're always at the mercy of bandwidth bottlenecking somewhere in the mix, so all you can do is buy or put together something that should perform as well as possible on paper. Also, not all controllers are created equal, as some have aggressive flow control and others don't. If you want to go USB 3.0, you buy a tower or whatever makes sense for your particular needs, put the highest performing drives you can afford in the storage unit (keeping in mind the airflow and thermal performance), put a high-quality pcie 4x USB 3.0 card in your desktop, and tweak accordingly. Even then, I would not use USB 3.0 for anything other than copying and portability as it just isn't as great as other interfaces for reliability and speed.

[Jeff Kilgroe]

What system will you be attaching this to?

If you want 6Gbps or something with more than 4 drives, SAS is the way to go. You still use SATA drives as SAS is downward compatible to SATA, but then you can fit up to 4 channels of 6Gbps (24Gbps aggregate; that's more than Thunderbolt) in a single cable connection. SAS is a problem if you want to connect to notebook PC or Macbook Pro...

I don't know of anyone offering 6Gbps eSATA in a system like you're asking. Sans Digital makes a couple nice ones that have both a USB3.0 and eSATA port and hold 4 or 5 drives with lots of RAID config options.