Internal vs External RAID

[jlipkin]

Right now, I'm storing my images on two 250g SATA drives, mirrored using an IF8UC-S0 SATA to FireWire 800/USB2.0 Bridge Board - Oxford 924 from fwdeptot.com attached using FW800 in an external enclosure. The drives are filling up and I'm considering a new configuration, namely:
1. external, hardware controlled RAID 5 using the bridgeboard
2. external hardware controlled mirrored RAID with the bridgeboard.


Questions:

1. Will there be a significant speed increase from 1 to 5?
2. In a four drive RAID 5 configuration, what would the data capacity be? If I have four 250g drives, the array would hold how much data?

Any thoughts?

[Noel_Carboni]

I can't answer your first point directly, but with Raid 5 you basically lose one drive's capacity, so four 250 GB drives give you 750 GB total with the ability to lose any one and keep on ticking.

-Noel

[jlipkin]

I'm beginning to think, after a bit of research, that this bridgeboard will not support RAID 5...

My next thought is to buy a PCI controller with an eSATA interface and put the drives outside my G5 in a tower.