Say you are building a new computer for video work
and are looking for around 250gig total HD space.

The best setup in my mind would be TWO Raid0 setups.
Best Speed and HD space at the most bang for your buck.

Say you are transcoding one set of Vobfiles from one drive to another drive,
If both are not as fast there would be a bottle neck.

To keep cost down it should use 4 Sata ports on your mobo.
What mobo have 4 ports and supports two raid0 setup?

There are cheap 2x port sata pci cards for around $35
if that would be a better option.

I good setup:
Using 4 Maxtor 80gb sata drives, cost: $288
For a total HD space of 320GB
Acting as two 160gb physical drives
each capable of 83mb/s sustained file transfers.


The safty issue using raid0 could be overcome as with so much
available HD space all the stuff in "My Documents" could be
backed-up to other drive on a weekly basis.
No need to back up programs etc, as you should always to a fresh
re-install of software if needed.

Others would go with this setup:
Boot drive: Raptor 10k 76GB, cost: $175
Second drive: 120gb ide, cost : $77
Third drive: 80gb ide, cost: $61

Total cost: $313 for a total of 276GB hard drive space.

You can see that my above dual raid0 setup is cheaper,
have more space and is faster.


Links:
Maxtor 80 gb HD
http://www.newegg.com/app/ViewProductDesc.asp?description=22-144-318&depa=1

Sata PCI card if mobo does not have 4 raid capable ports.
http://www.newegg.com/app/searchProductResult.asp?Submit=Go&Range=1&InnerCata=410&DEPA...rd&Order=price

$90 mobo with 4 sata
http://www.newegg.com/app/ViewProductDesc.asp?description=13-136-137&depa=1