RAID vs. 2 drive's???

[Sheesh]

Hello all! Newbie here, please help.

I'm finally building(with with help)a new home system on a budget. I am wondering what you all would suggest I do for storage. This machine will be used for general surfing, converting/burning audio/video files, watching movies on my TV, some gaming, and video capture from my cable box/video camera. The last being the peice that is new to me and what I want optimum drive performance for. Here is my setup so far. Data integrity is not a factor at all.

Asus A7N8X w/XP2700
512 mb DRR266 or 333 (question on another post!)
ATI Radeon 9000 Atlantis 64 MB
DVD & CD/RW drives
Capture card undecided(but probably hardware encoder)

Hard drives:
I have one 40GB WD J-series drive and one 80GB B-series drive. I want to use one in the new system and the other to go in my old 2nd machine to save some $.

From performance standpoint would it be better to get a two channel raid controller and add a second 80GB drive and run everything on the raid array? Or purchase a J-series 120GB drive and use that for vid capture, and put the OS/sytem files on the 40 GB drive? If I go with the 2 drive setup, would I need to get an add-on ATA100 controller forthe second drive to achieve optimum performance? Also, do I run the chance of running into IRQ issues with all these cards?Any advice would help alot.

Thanks!

 

[jim552]

Probably the best method for performance, and for saving money would be to put one drive as a master on IDE-0 as Boot/System drive, and put another drive as a master on IDE-1 as your data/capture drive. If you have a CD, rewriteable CD or DVD or..... you get the idea, then you will want to put that on IDE-1 also.

I'm personally pretty sold on the SATA drives in generally, and specifically with the Wester Digital Raptor for performance purposes.

At home I purchased an OLDER Toshiba DVD-R/RW drive. It works great, just slower than the newer ones. I picked it up new for $180.

I had some problems with some of the DVD Authoring software that I had. It seems that if the software says it can write DVD's, it doesn't necessarily mean that it will write them to the normal consumer DVD standard.

I ended up upgrading an older copy of ULead Video Studio. (I had to upgrade from the WEB since stores didn't have the Newest version.) That seems to work well.

For capturing, I've been using the ATI All-in-wonder Radeon 7500. I've been pretty happy. They have a newer one out now based on the Radeon 9000.

I hope that helps.