In collaboration with Steven F. Woolf, we bring you Part 3 of how to build your external SATA RAID array.

So far we've talked about PCI-based SATA RAID cards and then bridged the internal ports to external ports.

Now we're ready to look at SATA RAID cases.  You can very easily get ripped off looking for a great case, when all we actually need is something to house the 4 or more drives we want and provide reliable and adequate power along with good airflow.  A great place to find cheap RAID SATA cases is CoolDrives.com.  This one is $150 and will do everything we need, including providing hot-swappable access to the drives if your PCI card supports it.

 
Now you need to fill the case with drives.  The selection of large and affordable hard drives is enormous.  Pick drives with at least 8MB cache, and for best RAID performance, make sure all the drives are of the same exact manufacturer, model, and size.  Want a 1TB array?  Go for 4 x 250GB Western Digital HD's from NewEgg.com for $100 each.  And if you watch the deals on FatWallet.com or DealNews.com, you can do a lot better than those prices, too.

So far for our 1TB, 4-drive hardware-based RAID 0 array we've spent $230 on the RAID card, $25 on the bridge adapter, $150 on the case, and $400 on the drives, not including taxes or shipping, and not including any special deals that are regularly available.  We haven't saved all that much money over other out-of-the-box solutions, but the performance increase will be noticeable in real-world usage.  And that's what RAID is all about, frankly.

We still need external SATA cables to go from the back of the PC adapter card to the SATA case.  External SATA cables are not to be confused with internal SATA cables.  They require special shielding and they aren't cheap.  You can get them from MacGurus.com in 3ft and 6ft lengths for about $15 each.  Add $60 to our total for four.

Next: Sum it all up