I use one of those to clone drives and to create images/backups. It works fine for that. I never considered it to stream audio. It might be cool for sample libraries so you can keep one drive dedicated to that.
I’m sure it will work for audio. USB 3 is plenty fast and like I said, folks are streaming on external drives on usb 2. I still prefer internal sata drives for audio.
Best case would be a large (expensive) SSD that can take full advantage of a sata3 connection. But a 7200rpm spinny drive at sata2 works fine. Thunderbolt, firewire and USB3 come in slightly behind that.
All are perfectly usable. But as you go down the food chain, the “chances” for odd, random clicks, pops, dropouts do go up slightly due to interrupts. This can be addressed thru priority settings and such. But they are actually pretty hard to really track down. So I do my best to avoid it… 
This all being said… with the system you listed in the original post, this enclosure (or any external) and a couple of WD blue/black drives, you SHOULD be all set. But again, from what you were saying, you also SHOULD be fine with your current system. Look thru the sonar optimization guide and see if there are any glaring discrepancies.
Have fun
rich
I believe those were designed specifically for audio work, so if you want (or are fine re-purposing) using that drive I think it will work okay. You can always use it for awhile until you move to some other solution. Audio throughput, even on numerous armed recording tracks, is pretty manageable and doesn’t require a great deal of horsepower. Some extreme edits may actually be more challenging for it, but not likely an issue.
Yes, I have one and it works fine for everything. Initially they were popular with “gamers”. Mainly they are convenient if for some reason you want to swap drives or move offsite. I use mine for external backups at the moment.
The issue with my old computer is that the hard drive is on it’s last legs (it makes terrible noises), the fan sounds like it’s almost done, it has crashed a couple times, and it’s only a single core AMD processor. It’s about 10 or 12 years old. I could probably fix it, but it’s easier to just upgrade. I want something lightning fast that won’t give me any grief for a few years. I am also buying new software and building a new studio, so it just seems like good timing for the upgrade.
Absolutely right, it is time! You are (as you clearly understand) running at very high risk right now. Not worthwhile in either time or money to try to fix this thing, just take it out behind the barn and shoot it. 
I hope you’re all backed up, I just got burned by this same situation recently.
I thought you said it wasn’t a “bad” computer… Sounds pretty bad to me… :beerbang:
wasn’t bad, in the fact that it had lots of RAM, storage, etc. it’s just a bit worn out now. It could be salvaged, but it’s easier to buy new at this point
Thanks for all of the help guys. I did some shopping around and couldn’t really find another system that well priced (it’s in Canadian Dollars if you didn’t notice). The only thing seriously wrong is that it could use more slots for memory. I purchased a PCI card with firewire 800 for my glyph external hard drive to route audio, and I am going to use another external HDD on one of the usb 3.0 ports for backups and sound banks. I think that should take care of it. Thanks again for the input!