That's exactly what I've been doing for the past few years, and it's worked out great so far. The savings is substantialnot just in terms of cost, but space and hassle as well (having just bare drives means no lost power adapters to chase down). I have about 30 bare drives now, of which I mainly use ten or so. The rest are backups and archived material.
I use one of these:
http://www.sansdigital.com/towerraid-plus/tr8mbp.html. It can hold 8 drives at a time, and connects over eSATA, so you need a separate card. I'm not sure if the one it comes with is Mac compatible, but I went with a RocketRaid Quad eSATA card (
http://store.apple.com/us/product/TW106LL/A. The whole thing isn't quite as simple as just popping a drive in the reader (I have a couple of those too, but they don't get much use to tell the truth), but it's pretty simple to change out the drives. I've had this setup for about a year now, and it's been quite reliable.
If you have the bucks, though, you might even want to step it up a bit and go with SAS instead of eSATA. You can still use eSATA drives that way, but the connection to the computer is faster. For that, you'd need
one of these, which I believe is bundled with a RocketRaid 2722, which should be Mac compatible.
One nice thing about doing it this way is you can easily set up a RAID 0 or 5, which is particularly handy for high bandwidth stuff like HD editing (particularly if you're doing any onlining). I use a RAID 0 of four drives, and do regular backups (remember: RAID 5 does NOT count as a backup!) to another pair of drives I have installed in the Mac Pro's internal drive bays. If you do go that route, don't bother spending the extra money on the 7200 RPM drives for your system. The "green" drives work just as well, if not better, for a RAIDas spindle speed only affects latency, not throughputand tend to be substantially cheaper.
Lastly,
these are really handy for storing bare drives. They fit a 3.5" drive perfectly, and provide great environmental protection for handling or transport. Not a whole lot of shock protection, I guess, but modern hard drives are surprisingly tough.
Of course, this is all assuming you have a Mac Pro.
If not, avoid USB like the plague for doing video. If you can't get this setup to work over eSATA or FireWire, don't botheryour performance will just plain suck. You might want to go with
one of these instead (the version that has FireWire, obviously). A bit more expensive than the one you linked, but you won't want to bang your head against the desk when your system is dropping frames like they're on fire.
