I am in the process of building a new editing computer and am looking at external drive storage. I recently found the ICYDOCK eSATA enclosure in which I can install a serial hard drive connected directly to a serial port on the MB. Looks like no difference in read/write speeds than if it was installed in the PC. My plan is to use a removable drive per project (with a backup copy on another drive). What do you guys think about this.

http://www.tomshardware.com/2006/10/25/icydocks_mb559_happily_marries_esata_and_usb2-0/index.html

Regards,

Having swappable drives for various projects and clients is a great idea. It's how I have my system set up. Each client pays for their own drives and it's used exclusively for their projects.

It also prevents catastrophic loss of everyone's work in case a drive dies.

In my particular setup from Firmtek I can assign a pair as a mirrored or striped pair, depending on what I need. Working drives are striped for speed. Archive drives are mirrored for protective redundancy.

Feels a bit odd when writing to a mirrored RAID. You feel like you need to make a backup when you actually already are.