Machine Building Strategies

[maxtrack]

I am about to buy some new hardware which will be dedicated to video editing, rendering, etc.

I want to know the best way to configure the machine.
I have read the best plan is to have the opsys and NLE software on C:
a separate drive for swap space D:
and two other drives ...
1 for digital video source E:
1 for digital video render output F:

recenty someone informed me (face to face conversation) the over head of
running multiple hard drives defeats the anticipated benefits..... (?)

Could someone direct me to sites, documentation, gurus, who can tell me the tried and tested and true best way to set up a machine to optimize NLE performance.

Thank you in advance,
~ Allen

[Soopafresh]

recenty someone informed me (face to face conversation) the over head of
running multiple hard drives defeats the anticipated benefits..... (?)

Not entirely true. It depends on the application. If you're demuxing or muxing (a process which does a lot of writing to the drive) or capturing video, 2 physical hard drives are significantly faster than 1. If you're encoding or rendering out of Vegas, for example (a slow process), there isn't much benefit in 2 physical drives.

The faster processors have pretty much negated the argument that multiple hard drives create an performance hit to the system- especially if you're using SATA drives, which aren't as CPU hungry as the older PATA drives were.

[maxtrack]

i did a test rebuild of my present machine
SATA drive is opsys and host of NLE software

when capturing to this drive I was getting nasty frame drops.
I added an IDE as the target drive to my capture and the frame
drops went away.