Pls advise which Raid config is better

[hantanbl]

Hi, I have just got some new hardwares but have not assembled them yet.

Gigabytex 7DXR+
AMD Athlon 1900
3X256MB Kingston PC2100 DDR RAM
1 X 1394 Firewire card
2X Maxtor 60GB ATA133
1X IBM 60GB ATA100 (old HDD)
Liteon 32x CD writer

The new PC is intended to convert my Sony Digital 8 tapes to either SVCD or VCD. I have 2 choices and need advice or comments from the gurus

1) To configure the old IBM 60GB ATA100 HDD in IDE1(master) with WIN2K loaded. CD Writer in IDE2 (master). The other 2 new Maxtor ATA133 HDDs in IDE3 & 4 configure as Raid0 which will store all the AVI and MPEG files.

2) Alternatively, to leave the old IBM HDD alone. Configure the 2 new Maxtor HDDs in IDE 3&4 as Raid0 and load WIN2K. All the AVI n MPEG files will also use this drive.

I really need to know the pros and cons of this 2 setups and appreciate your feedback. Tks

[mikerios]

keep the ibm as fat32 boot, win2ksp2, the maxtors as master/slave on their own channel, not raid set up, but ntfs volumes. Then you have plenty of room for storage, but more importantly you have crash recovery status, as unless you have your raid mirrored, if one drive goes down , even if one of the maxtors acts up, as unraided ntfs volumes can still be recovered with lost n found or ez recovery.

[Morheus]

Hantanbl,
I like Option 2 ... i am wondering why u want to load an O/S though on IDE 3 and or 4?
are you out there hosting? If not why the raid?

As above Option 2 is the way to go, unless ur starting over again by considering wiping ur old HDD. Then my comment changes ...

Tony

Please let us know what u elected to do

[hantanbl]

Tks Morheus n Mikerios for the reply. I am looking at Raid0 as I am into video editing and I brought the CD Writer to burn all files as and when I finished converting from Digital 8 to VCD or SVCD format. I do not intend to keep the files in HDD for too long as I know the risk of Raid0. What I need is fast capturing and conversion using TMPEGENC, VirtualDub etc.

I have seem a report saying something like for faster video editing performance, you should dedicate a disk solely for video capturing n conversion and leave your OS on another drive. This will be my option 1, that is : to reformat and load WIN2K SP2 on the old IBM 30GB ATA100 HDD (connected to the 1st IDE port as Master) and configure the 2 Maxtor 60GB ATA133 HDD on IDE3 & IDE4 as Raid0, this will give me a combine disk space of 120 GB to capture, convert and edit video.

Option 2 is to forget about the IBM HDD and straight away put the 2 new Maxtor HDDs into IDE 3 n IDE 4 for Raid 0. load WIN2K SP2 into this combine drive of 120 GB and do all video stuff on this drive also.

I am wondering anybody out there try this before. If not, I might just spend the weekend setting up both options and do my own benchmarking.

[holistic]

Digital 8 = DV = 3.7 Mb/s

A raid array is OVERKILL


But hey whatever - each to their own

[bugster]

A RAID array may not be necessary for video capture, modern HD's are plenty fast enoug for this. But faster disk speeds are almost ALWAYS welcome, especially when working with large files such as DV video. I have a system with a 120Gb raid0 on 2 disks and it flies compared to the same system minus raid. I say go for it (option 1 will give the best compromise of performance and safety, but dont forget to backup!)

[mikerios]

Morheus,

the reason why IDE 3 or 4 is that's where the Raid channels are and thus you can boot to the RAID once it set that way in the BIOS. As for me, both my rigs were once RAID0, but since I have converted back to ntfs partions per drive each one master, plenty of room for video editing and capture ( some 530Gb total system wide ).