New box

[jaybird]

I'm building a new PC for video editing.

I have a dual Pentium mobo that has on-board raid.

I have 2 harddrives, a 40 gig ATA100 and a 120 gig ATA100, both are 7200 rpm drives.

My question is this:

For DV camcorder capture and edit am I better off to leave the drives on different channels(both ATA100), or should they be setup as a raid array?

Right now I have them on different channels, the 40 gig has my Operating Systems on it as well as my video software on it and the 120 gig has 2 partitions(60 gig ea.), one is FAT32 and the other is NTFS for storage of the edited video prior to burning to DVD.

I run WIN98SE and 2000 Pro, dual-boot.

Any thoughts on this would be greatly appreciated!

[indolikaa]

It doesn't matter.

I've done both and never had issues either way. ATA/100 with 7200rpm drives is more than adequate for video capture.

[jaybird]

What about the editing and rendering as well as encoding?

I'm using either VirtualDUB or Ulead Video Studio 5.0 for capture(WinTV GO! or Firewire), TMPGEnc Plus! for encoding, Adobe Premiere 6.5 for editing and DVDit! SE for DVD burning.

Does any of this make a difference?

[pixel]

Well, for rendering and editing the drives only transfer data between them as fast as the processor can encode, which doesn't mean a lot of data.

You are always better to encode to between seperate drives or I think a raid array is also fast enough not to slow you down.

I would take the easy way and just encode from your capture drive to your other drive.