RAID 0 or dedicated capture drive? TWO hard dives ONLY.

[kceq]

I ONLY have TWO hard drives. I’ve heard RAID 0 is great for capturing and I’ve heard you should have a dedicated hard drive for capturing. I am sure both are true but if I can only pick one, what it best? I really don't want to buy another hardrive...unless it would make a world of difference. Either way I would like to know what is more performance enhancing.

Specs
P4 3ghz ht, 800 mgz front bus, 1 gig pc3200, 2 SATA 7200rpm 120 GB. ATI Radeon 9000 All-in-Wonder card. Capturing hi 8 to put on DVD.
Capturing VBR mpeg2 352x480 bit rate max 4.0, motion 99 and 256 audio (per digitalfaq) while I posting let me ask this. Since I have a computer that can handle a higher bit rate and/or resolution should I do it will it make the DVD better?

[THE RIPPER]

Just make a seperate partition for your capture drive.

[kceq]

---"Just make a seperate partition for your capture drive."---

wait a second I thought the whole purpose of having a seperate DRIVE is that a drive can only read OR right at one time. Having the OS on the same DRIVE, regardless if it is partitioned, will slow the write down because it has to read OS stuff. Partioning the hard drive does not give a DRIVE the ability to read one partition while writing to another partion on the same DRIVE.

[THE RIPPER]

Yes but it will still be faster then non raid single drive.Well you don't have many options unless you get a 3rd drive.

[kceq]

Oh I think I understand now. Your suggesting doing RAID 0 with two partions. So your saying RAID 0 is better than a seperate capture drive. Gotcha thanks.

Anyone else have experience?

[thecoalman]

I have a similar system to yours and have no problem with dropped frames regardless of which drive I have captured too, whether it was the one the os was installed on or the one for storage. The only time I have dropped frames is when I got near the end of the drive capacity. I'm assuming it was because it started seeking places to put the capture. It wasn't defragmented. I haven't even had to turn off virus or firewall, but I do. I captured a 45 min. 720x480 uncompressed AVI that came out to something like 52 gigs without a dropped frame.

From my understanding Raid 0 is for high performance, it writes the file to both discs at once effectivley doubling your write speed (this could be wrong). But if you lose one drive it renders the data on the other useless.

The reason for a dedicated capture drive is so you don't have a lot a of files with empty space between them. If the drive starts to write to the empty spaces between a bunch of files it may drop frames.I wouldn't worry about it unless you start dropping frames or are looking to increase overall disc performance.

I'm using no raid configuration at all.