I have an older Dell R710 for my personal home server with a pair of PERC6i raid cards in it. I have a drive array attached to one of them where the data lives on different RAIDs, the other PERC6 is attached to the R710's 8 drive bays.
I'm abandoning tape as a backup and moving to disc drives, which I will rotate off site. I am trying to figure out which would be the faster device. In both cases, a spinning drive, not a SSD is preferred as I've read many SSDs can lose their data when shelved, and powered off. I understand that is less likely with a regular disc drive. So, assuming similar drive specs, which would be faster for throughput:
a) A PERC6i connected drive running raid 0 (single drive) or b) Add a PCIe USB3.0 card and use USB 3.0 (or USB C) external drives.
Cost-wise they are similar. The latter USB 3.0 option is probably more convenient, readily portable, and has broad compatibility with a restore or access. But, an external USB 30 non SSD drive may be hard to get before long.
If the hotswappable drive bay is faster by much, I can get some drive caddys and use that as my backup device..
I'm fuzzy on what should be faster. I gather the PERC6 is a 3 Gbps device while USB3.0 can do 5 Gbps. The R710 manual says that PCIe gen 2 is supported, there are 2 PCIe x8 slots and I think that limit is 500MBps so I assume the PCI won't be a bottleneck to USB3.