Best Way to achieve Fast Data Transfer? And, ideal way to deal with Duplicate Data?

With that many external drives why not combine them into a raid 5 Drobo or similar?

Okay, that could be a good suggestion, Aaron.  But I haven't the first clue about RAID, what's involved, what a "Drobo" is, or what the benefits of that could be, other than I understand RAID means the drives write faster because they write across each other, somehow... sorry, I'm going to need a bit of an education, on top of any advice.

Drobo is a brand o external storage chassis. The one I use most is a Drobo pro 2nd gen. It has 5 drive bays, usb3, FireWire, and esata. I put 5 2tb drives in and see 1 8tb drive. The reason it's only 8 an not 10 is because it uses raid5. One drive can fail and all I do is replace it and it rebuilds automatically. I lose no data. It also writes faster than a single drive because of the way it stripes data across all the drives. I use slow wd20ears drives and can do a sustained write of 150MBps over esata.

That's rather fascinating!  Sounds a tad expensive, though, for the Drobo?  Recommendations there?  So, a drive fails and it's no big deal... that's pretty cool.  It's like having the ultimate backup, then, isn't it?  The outlay for 5 2tb drives would be a bit steep, but could I do that with (a) my 2x1TB, 2x500GB drives, and (b) what about my closed external drives... would you just take those out of their cases?  

Now, it's intriguing that you suggest you use slower drives (ear?)... like 5400's?  Those are quite a bit cheaper than the 7200's, I might be able to do a few of those.  If I'm hearing you correctly, basically, speed of drive not as important when you use RAID5... 150MBps is very, very fast by any real world standards, I believe.  

Okay, so now that you have my attention... this is great stuff, Aaron;  getting one of these Drobo's, and filling it with drives, is there much to setting that up then?  And, what about the Operating system, should that be a part of the Drobo, or separate?

Oops... wanted to ask just how much of a speed difference there is between the 7200's and the 5400's when in a Drobo?  And, would it need to be consistent, all 5400's or all 7200's?

It has become about devising a storage and backup plan, you're absolutely right about that.  And, I think you're right, I need to step back and look at it.  You've provided me with a ton of information, Aaron, and really useful info.  I know so much more about this than I did yesterday, so thank you.  But, yes, I need to think about it for a little bit.  I'm a guy who believes in going high-end on things to avoid a lot of the pitfalls, I've learned paying extra leaves some of the picky work behind, but I don't think I can fit $1300 into my budget just for a housing for my hard drives, and then start purchasing drives as well.  At this point, I suspect that I might be better off trying to just upgrade what I've got into a faster environment that's not quite so expensive.... I guess transforming my system into USB 3.0 would simply mean upgrading my processor/motherboard to something newer, right?  

I have Vice-Versa, which sounds good and supposedly handles duplicates, but I haven't had a chance to use it yet, and you made a real good point about software making mistakes.  Maybe you're right, about doing a new original drive and a backup drive.  I have a 64GB SSD drive unopened, I could put that in for my original drive with O/S, for fast access, and then purchase/add a 3TB and start putting everything onto there, and then use one or two of my 1TB drives as backups, which I believe Vice-Versa will automatically set those up... any recommendations there?

Also, thinking of upgrading to 64-bit Windows7... will this mean a lot of my software won't run properly if I do a new install and start this whole thing over fresh again?  Sorry, different topic, I should be asking that somewhere else.  Maybe I should take some time and consider my options.  You've given me lots to think about.  I'll ponder this for a bit, a question or two may come up, but I'll award the points as is when I do that, Aaron.  Thank you so much for your expertise!!

I meant it was $1300 with drives, tax, shipping, everything you need for an 8tb raid 5 array. In fact I think I had a $40 esata pciexpress card in there too.  The drobo chassisby itself was a little over $700.
There are cheaper chassis options. You can get 5 drive esata expander chassis for around 300 but it's a put it together yourself kinda thing. I use these for video editing Mac pros and it had to be super easy and quiet.
I've also done sata -> sas chassis with a mid range highpoint rocketraid controller. Even more do it yourself but better speed and almost as cheap as an esata expander chassis.

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