[LAU] drive bays and hardware RAID

[plutek]

greetings!

i'm looking at my pile of external audio drives and backup drives, and wondering about better solutions.

a friend has recently mentioned multiple-drive bays, which allow you to swap raw drives in/out at will, eliminating all the individual enclosures. we also had a discussion about bays which implement hardware RAID for realtime mirroring.

i'm wondering if any of you have experience with these sorts of devices in the context of linux multitrack audio work. specific concerns might be things like:

1. reduction of total throughput in a combined-disk device relative to separate drive enclosures connected to their own USB ports

2. reduction of total throughput caused by the RAID mirroring process, even when it is done by dedicated hardware

3. linux compatibility

4. expense

any experience and/or recommendations about doing this sort of thing would be most welcome! thanks in advance.

cheers!

-- 
.pltk.