External Storage/Backup

I'm considering moving to a laptop and am looking for some advice regarding external storage. In my desktop I had dual 2TB drives linked together in a dynamic disk mirror in Windows 7. I have dual 640GB drives as well. The desktop is gone but I still have the drives, data included, and I am trying to figure out how I could use them with a laptop.

Ideally I could get a single 4 bay eSata external enclosure ( Newegg.com - SANS DIGITAL TowerRAID TR4M+BNC 4 Bay eSATA Port Multiplier JBOD Tower (no eSATA card bundled) (Black)) or two 2 bay enclosures because this would work exactly like my desktop. The difficulty is that many laptops don't have eSata and even if they do, there is no mention anywhere of whether or not they support the port multiplier feature that such an enclosure would require.

I could also get a USB 3 enclosure(s) and it would be a lot easier to find a compatible laptop for this. However, Windows 7 doesn't let you access dynamic disks over removable connections such as USB, so although I could access the disks separately I could not mirror them. I would have to manually copy and backup the files or use software to do it for me.

A third option would be to build a basic desktop to host the files over my home network. This would mostly work except that I have to buy a new router and enough parts to rebuild my desktop and even then I couldn't really take it with me when I travel.

Do I have any other options? I'd prefer to avoid a hardware-based raid solution for cost and compatibility reasons but that's the only other thing I can think of. Does anyone have any alternatives or if not, which method would you recommend?

 

You can try an eSATA/USB 2.0 hard drive docking station for normal backups. It's a pretty cheap solution to move files around. I have a bunch of sata hard drives laying around and I just slide them into the docking station for Robocopy backups.
Micro Center - Thermaltake Thermaltake BlacX Duet Dual Hard Drives Docking Station - SATA to USB 2.0 and eSATA ST0014U

There is also a USB 3.0 version; however, I haven't seen a eSATA/USB 3.0 version yet though. Eventually, someone will make one.

You can also buy a cheap router with Gigabit connection (with the use of an old computer) and transfer files quickly through the network (assuming both ends are Gigabit). Ethernet 10/100 transfer rates are slow.

 

I have a 3.5" USB2/eSata enclosure which works great but only holds one drive. There are plenty of enclosures or docks that hold 2, 4 or 8 drives but how do I connect them?

eSata won't work unless the laptop supports port multiplier and as far as I can tell, none do.

USB 2 is far too slow for 2TB drives. I have a 1.6TB file and on USB 2 that would take 9 hours at max speed without any overhead loss to transfer. Real life is days.

USB 3 should be almost as fast as eSata and I could connect multiple drives at once but Windows 7 software mirror depends on the drives being dynamic disks and you can't access dynamic disks over a "removable" connection such as USB. There may be a registry hack to let you do this and I am still researching this option.

The only thing I can think of is get some 2 or 4 bay USB 3 enclosures and buy a third 2TB drive to move the data around as I reformat my existing drives as basic disks instead of dynamic disks. Then I can toss them into the USB 3 enclosure and treat them as single disks, somehow manually keeping track of when and how to backup the files from one to another. This seems like such a backwards solution though. There must be a better option.