storage & backup

I'm not a noob but I figured this question was most fitting here.

I do a lot of design/photo/video work, and right now I have 5 or 6 external hard drives hooked up, including a 1tb drive on time machine, which isn't enough to backup all my data anymore. Some drives aren't hooked up because I'm out of ports

Anyway, since I'm almost out of free space on all of my drives and need a bigger backup, I've been investigating RAID solutions all night but am still just as stuck as when I started.

I'm thinking the best idea would be to buy a usb/fw enclosure with at least 2 bays, load a couple of 1tb+ drives, and use that as backup. Then I could make my current 1tb external drive into more space. However, I've had an impossible time find an enclosure. I don't have a grand to drop on a drobo, and all the cheap enclosures on newegg either have sub-par reviews or only have eSATA output(Rosewill), for which there is virtually no way to connect to my iMac.

So, I open up the floor to you all. Ideas, anyone?

Have you looked at some of the RAID multibay enclosures on Otherworldcomputing.com? These are all designed to be used with Mac and most of them are reasonably priced.

The Drobo is the best option, and it needn't cost you a grand. I've seen them run around $340. Now, that's without any drive mechanisms, but then, you can always take your drives out of the external enclosures you already own and pop them into the Drobo. The beauty of the Drobo is that the drives don't have to be the same size, and it's still redundant (I'm not sure how they go about that black magic, but considering how highly regarded it is, I'd imagine it does work).

Personally, I use a DNS-323 NAS. I liked it quite a bit at first, but in recent months I've had a lot of trouble maintaining the RAID mirror. But if you don't need redundancy (and IMHO, it's quite risky running RAID0 or JBOD), it might work out for you (although I'm not sure if Gigabit Ethernet is fast enough for what you're doing). The DNS-323 should run you about $170 if you shop around.

Eventually I would like to get a Drobo with the network adapter. Unfortunately, the network adapter is really outrageously priced and until it comes closer to reality, I'm going to try to keep this DNS-323 running in RAID1.