newbie zfs query - usb3 or sata?

[John]

Hello freebsd-fs. I have a possible newbie question, and am not sure
if this should go into -hardware:

I have the situation where I need to add more hard drives but I haven't
got the space in the existing box. So I have two choices - make
a DAS box out of a SATA connection or make one out of a USB3
connection (using a Highpoint usb3 card with 4 ports and 4 channels).
I'll be ZFS-ing them together on 9.2-R.

The question is, under zfs which kind of setup will be better?
I can stick 8GB RAM into the machine. I want to get 4x 4Tb drives.
With the 4-port card, one will go into each port. Similarly
with a 4-port SATA. Performance-wise is there much in it, and
will ZFS be able to handle it. The machine is a desktop.

The other thing I need to know is, should the machine die, can I just pull
the card/disks and put it into another freebsd machine, install zfs and 
expect the data to still be there?

thanks,
--
John