2 hard drives full. need good external solution

Question

Hello
i have a PowerMac g5 2.5 Ghz with a 150 GB main hard drive (the original) and an added 250 GB hard drive in the second drive slot. I have a >100GB Aperture library now (a lot of 5D raws). I am diligent about backing up to a vault on the other drive. This combined with some movies, all my iTunes, etc I'm full with only 8GB left on my boot drive. I've been shuffling stuff around but the need to have a lib on one drive and a vault on the other leaves me with little room.
Now I could skip the vault stuff if I had some protected RAID setup like RAID 0 or 5 since the drive would have redundancy built in. How much slower does aperture run when you go from an internal SATA drive to an external FireWire 800 drive. Or should I get a eSATA setup? Anyone know if there are any good eSATA cards for my machine? What drive do you recommend and what capacity. I figure at least 500 GB of actual storage taking into account the RAID config (so raid 0 would need to be a Terabyte). Any good drive values out there?
Would love to see what you guys with really big libraries are doing.
Thanks.
-Josh

Answer 1

Yes and no, you should keep your OS and Aperture app on something relatively fast... ie the internal drive(s) Swap files, Virtual memory, etc are all stored here, and any bottlenecks can slow things down. I use a pair of striped Raptors, but I think that there are better, simpler solutions available now.
As for your library raw speed seems to be less critical for aperture (exception: backing up with the vaults), I would skip the USB altogether, in my experience the speed varies quite a bit and it isn't hard to plug something else into your computer that unwittingly knocks the USB 2.0 speed down to 1.1. FW 400 is probably enough though my experiences wth FW 800 are much better.
However; I think Sata is the consistant winner here. For backups I have an external case similar to this:
http://www.censuspc.com/Mapower-5.25-inch-3-Bay-External-Enclosure-Map-N531-01-9 8-Beige-or-Black-pr-639.html
or this:
http://www.macpower.com/SS-35KSAT1_14.html
And then use hot swap 'racks' and 'trays' similar to this:
http://www.plinkusa.net/webmob201.htm
which offer a fan for each drive (travels with the drive case), and fully enclose the drive in a case when removed.
or these which are a bit smaller, but don't generally have internal fans (the fans are in the fixed part of the case or rack), the drives are exposed when removed, but they are a bit smaller and generally cheaper, you can fit 5 of them in the space of three standard bays.
http://www.excaliberpc.com/ICYDock_MB455_5_x_SATA_MultiDrive/CMX-MB455/partinfo-id-563803.html
This allows me to purchase bare 250gig drives for around 70$ now, drop them in a tray for about 12-30 $$ depending on model, and where purchased. Then use them like high speed 250gig floppies.
For Archiving the 5* stuff I additionally use these DVD's
http://www.delkin.com/products/archivalgold/index.html
Note I have no affiliation with any of the above products or companies, and only show them as examples. Hunt around for the best products and deals for you. (most of that stuff I linked can be had cheaper, I just grabbed the first links that illustrated the stuff)
Good Luck!
PowerMac G5 2x2ghz   Mac OS X (10.4.6)   nvidia Geforce 6800 GT (256meg) (4gig ram)