ESATA would be much faster, 40MB/s on USB2, and 150MB/s on ESATA 1 (150) and more if you have faster ESATA.

Just make sure the cable is under 6 feet to the external.


You could also consider one of these if you have 5 1/4 drive open. They make smaller versions as well. All depends on what you have installed in the PCIe and PCI slots on your 8700 system.

http://www.icydock.com/goods.php?id=192

Use 2 SATA from motherboard
Plus :SIIG DP SATA 6Gb/s 4-Port Hybrid PCIe" controller in the PCIe slot 3
Plus "SIIG Sata II-150 PCI 2PORT Internal Controller" - 133MB controller in the PCI slot 4

Basically you would be over subscribing the PCI and PCIe slots to support the multiple HDDs. But chances are you would not be utilizing all 8 simultaneously. The 2 drives on the motherboard slots would be full bandwidth. If you wanted to software RAID the disks, you would just have to be smart on which drives and controllers the RAID spans. You could put long term storage drive on the on the PCI slot drives in RAID1, or use those slots for removable long term storage. You will only get about 50-80MBs to the PCI drives in RAID 1

*one thing to note on H57 chipset is that chances are the 1x PCIe slots may not achieve PCIe2.0 speeds. There was some controversy on this depending on the manufacturer. PCIe 1.0 1x only supports 250MB/s spread across the amount of controllers you slot in.