WD 'Green' Drives good for capture or not ?

[poisondeathray]

Yes 7 to 9 seconds is crazy ridiculous. But I mentioned earlier - There is a firmware utility that allow you to adjust the idle period required for drive park , I think up to 300 seconds . But I don't think you can turn it off completely in these older models . Anyways those are some big reasons why I hate these drives (and the loud "clunk" noises). Maybe the new ones are better

The utility is called "wdidle3" . Here is an article about it . I dont' know if it's applicable to the 3TB or newer models

http://www.storagereview.com/how_to_stop_excessive_load_cycles_on_the_western_digital_...s_with_wdidle3

[jagabo]

Well, crap. The 3 TB drive I thought was a WD Green is another brand. The other drive is definitely a 3 TB WD Red and is free of the issues discussed earlier. I'm sure I have a smaller WD Green drive somewhere. I'll have to find it and test it.

[aedipuss]

i'm not complaining about wd greens, they do what i bought them for. large cheap storage that turns itself off when not needed. i knew it going in, and after 2+ years in service they still work great with good s.m.a.r.t. readings. but for use in a "normal" computer i'd definitely go with non "intellipower" blacks or whatever samsung f3s are called now.

[hello_hello]

Dropping frames when you start capturing..... I don't know.... maybe I'm missing something..... but where's the drive's buffer while it's waiting for the heads to start writing? For that matter, where is the PC's RAM?

I own 14 WD Green drives. Admittedly, most of them have never seen the inside of a PC as they're just used in docks for storage. Two of them are 1TB models which lived in a PC for a couple of years. They're also used for external storage now but they're still going strong.

I think the head parking issue has maybe been blown out of proportion over the years. The rotation speed may slow in low power mode but I don't think they actually stop spinning until they're told to (ie OS power management) so any delay after a period of inactivity shouldn't be very long at all. Just the time it takes to un-park the heads, and I'd have thought the drive's buffer should take care of that.

The purpose of the head parking is simply to reduce the aerodynamic drag on the spinning platters, given the heads are held above the platters by a cushion of air, so less drag means less power to keep them spinning. Unfortunately this can mean somewhat excessive head loading and unloading, but as best as I can tell, the newer drives don't park their heads as often as the older models. According to the info in the pdf on this page, the default idle time for low power mode for the enterprise green drives is now five minutes, so I assume the consumer drives have had their low power modes increased in a similar manner.

There's a list of effected consumer drives on this page, along with a link to the utility to change the idle time, but I don't think it includes any current models: http://wdc.custhelp.com/app/answers/detail/a_id/5357
According to WD the drives are validated for one million load/unload cycles.

I do wonder though if my drives behave differently in terms of head parking (I have some drives in the list while others are more recent) because I use them in USB docks rather than connected internally. When I get a chance, I'll have to connect a couple via SATA and sit them on top of the PC so I can keep an eye on them, but I wonder if the USB dock and the drive are continually communicating, which stops the drive from going into low power mode even when it's been doing nothing for hours. The one currently running in the dock hasn't been accessed for at least an hour and it's still quite warm. I copied a file from it and the process began instantly. No pause, no clicks.

Personally, for internal drives I'd not use Green drives simply because when it comes to manipulating large files, speed is more important. The Green drives are great for external storage, especially when they're sitting in docks, as they're quiet and they run much cooler than 72000rpm drives, but for internal drives, speed is king in my book.

[sanlyn]

I have a couple of Green drives on PC's I've built -- they are not used for the OS drives. I don't recall seeing any 5400 jobs, all of mine are 7200 rpm. I wasn't even aware of the "park" function, but I do note that if I haven't accessed one of those drives for several minutes that there is a slight pause when I first look into files on those Green drives. I guess the park feature explains it

With the external and USB drives, I'm not surprised at the pause and usually expect it. I use external drives for storage only, never for capture.

[hello_hello]

I have a couple of Green drives on PC's I've built -- they are not used for the OS drives. I don't recall seeing any 5400 jobs, all of mine are 7200 rpm.

The Green drives definitely aren't 7200rpm drives. I don't think WD have ever published their actual rotation speed, which has led to theories in forums that it varies, but the general consensus seems to be they're 5400rpm drives.
They're not actually all that slow..... in fact because they're newer and store the data more densely, the 2TB models are only marginally slower than my old 7200rpm 500GB drives (if memory serves me correctly) but they're definitely not as fast as the blue/black WD drives because of the slower rotation speed.

[hello_hello]

Well I connected a WD20EARS drive (as it's on WD's list of effected drives) to an eSata port on the PC, which is in turn connected to a normal SATA port on the MB, and left it sitting on my desk. I also disabled SpeenFan because I'd read somewhere it's S.M.A.R.T. feature can cause the heads to unpark, so just to be sure.....
15 minutes later and it's still spinning and still getting slightly warmer. I tried copying a file from it and heard a very tiny click when it started but there didn't seem to be any pause at all.

I wonder if some versions of Windows cause the drives to spin down by default, hence the longer pause? I'm using XP with power management disabled for hard drives in Control Panel.

I'll try again in another 15 minutes and edit this post if the result is different.

Another 15 minutes later it's definitely still spinning. A slight click when the file copy operation started. No significant pause to speak of.

[sanlyn]

I don't really know where the pause comes from. It's not much of a problem, anyway. Of course those 2.5" USB drives are slow as hell, as you'd expect, but they're strictly for archives. For video file transfer from PC to PC I use A.C.-powered fan-cooled external drives. I never checked the rpm of the Green drives -- they're in external enclosures, seldom in constant use, and not used for processing or capture.

I have two capture-only home built PC's, IDE only. They are home for two old AllInWonder AGP cards. All captures are copied and/or transferred to other drives and Pc's. The IDE drives are anywhere from 3 to 5 years old. But those machines are for VHS capture, nothing else, and never used for longer than it takes to capture and then copy or transfer. The interiors are cleaned and dusted twice a year, even if I've used the machines for only a few hours. I guess frequent cleaning and infrequent use are the only things that keep them going.

I have yet to use one of those Greens for capture. Considering their slowpoke behavior, I'd hesitate to tempt fate.

As for 1 or 2 TB drives .... I realize that any drive can develop problems, but I never use anything bigger than 500GB. The thought of maintaining and losing data a terabyte at a time is too scary.

[jagabo]

I have yet to use one of those Greens for capture. Considering their slowpoke behavior, I'd hesitate to tempt fate.

Today's 5400 RPM green drives are faster than your 5 year old 7200 RPM drives.

[sanlyn]

You could be right. But those old AGP motherboards won't take newer drives. On the other hand, except for a couple of rotten crummy no-good irreparable tapes that I threw away, I've had only 3 dropped frames since 2004. Yes, I kept track.

[aedipuss]

not to change the subject too much but what's the difference between the green and red drives? they didn't have reds when i put greens in nas boxes, but now they advertise reds as their nas drives.

[jagabo]

not to change the subject too much but what's the difference between the green and red drives?

$20.

[hello_hello]

I don't really know where the pause comes from. It's not much of a problem, anyway. Of course those 2.5" USB drives are slow as hell, as you'd expect, but they're strictly for archives. For video file transfer from PC to PC I use A.C.-powered fan-cooled external drives. I never checked the rpm of the Green drives -- they're in external enclosures, seldom in constant use, and not used for processing or capture.

It's possible the USB enclosure is putting the drive to sleep (spinning it down) if they're not accessed for a period of time. All my external drives are "loose" drives I use in USB2/USB3/eSata docks, but my other half has a couple of WD extrenal drives, and they both nap their drives if they're not used for a while. None of the docks I use put the drives to sleep. Well one of them does when the PC is turned off, but the rest still keep the drives spinning regardless.

Despite WD stating they're not designed for it, I ran two 1TB green drives as a single RAID-0 volume in a PC for a year or so without any trouble. There was also a pair of 320GB 7200RPM drives running as a RAID-0 volume in the same PC and I couldn't really pick the difference between them, speed wise.

I have yet to use one of those Greens for capture. Considering their slowpoke behavior, I'd hesitate to tempt fate.

Have a look at this. The first is an old Seagate 500GB 7200rpm drive. The second is a 2TB WD Green drive. I don't quite get the "slow" thing, unless your drives are running in USB2 enclosures. Ignore the CPU usage part. The PC was busy converting a video.... using a different drive or course. Also ignore the burst rate, that's not the drive, it's the SATA controller.

Naturally a new 7200rpm large capacity drive will be even faster.

As for 1 or 2 TB drives .... I realize that any drive can develop problems, but I never use anything bigger than 500GB. The thought of maintaining and losing data a terabyte at a time is too scary.

500GB almost seems small these days.
My solution for playing it somewhat safer is to store everything on two drives, which is why I've got quite a few "loose" 2TB drives. One gets used for playback while the second is basically only used when saving files to it.

And look at it this way..... if you short stroke the 2TB drive by just using a single 500GB partition and ignoring the rest, the speed difference increases substantially. The 500GB drive manages 110MB/s at the beginning, but by the end it's only doing 50MB/s.
Now look at the first 500GB of the 2TB drive. It's also transferring at a rate of around 110MB/s at the beginning, but at the 500GB mark it's still doing over 100MB/s. And seek times for the 500GB partition would also be much lower than the average seek time for the 500GB drive, especially if they both rotate at the same speed. And of course you still have 1.5GB of extra space to use for storage

[sanlyn]

Hm, those points are worth a look. The 320/500GB drives I refer to aren't used for processing, I use only in-PC drives for work. The externals are only for archives. I don't even use them for playing. The archives are original captures and copies of what I have on optical disk. When the archive is 20% full (which actually takes a while, I don't archive VHS that quickly), I get a new drive.

But obviously those little 2.5" USB's are dropping off to sleep. The only one of those I use daily has web and forum pages, scripts, plugin downloads, and a mirror of Avisynth, VirtualDub, and AfterEffects folders. I refer to that little tyke all day and hook it up to whatever PC I'm using so that Avisynth, etc., always have the same plugins, updates and whatnot on all machines. I've waited up to 15 seconds to access that drive after not using it for a few minutes. About once a month I make an exact copy of it. (I used to think all those optical disks were taking up a lot of room. Now I'm running out of places to keep the drives!)

Two of these four PC's have USB2 only. Those are the capture-only PC's, which doesn't bother me much, but I'm about ready to get eSATA cards for all machines. Just too busy to get to it. This is a lot of trouble, I know, but the biggest problem is explaining to the wife why I have 4 PC's.

The images and notes you posted are worth noting, as some of these in-PC drives are getting a bit fat. XP is installed on all 4 PC's on single 160GB drives. I keep those defragged and none are more than 30% full, so space usage wouldn't slow them down according to your notes. The new PC has SATA6 and USB3 everywhere, and I can tell the difference. Meanwhile, for storage I see I could save some cash and not lose much performance by looking for a Green drive the next time I visit MicroCenter or Newegg.

This thread has dealt with capture and storage on different drive types, but what about working space? When you deal with crappy VHS captures you tend to make umpteen versions of pieces of video while trying to fix 'em up. I keep different versions until I have what I want, but even tiny 0.5-GB chunks of video start filling a drive after umpteen version runs and several different scenes. Considering how that data gets splayed all over the drive after a few days, it might be worth it to replace them with 1 TB drives. Obviously they still have to be pruned after a project is finished. But your posted 'scopes have me thinking that my working-space drives should be bigger: most are 320GB, a couple of 500's, and a stingy little 250. I'm building up for HD work now, so obviously a 500 GB drive will no longer suffice.

If VHS didn't look so damn bad, I'd just go back to it and find a CRT TV somewhere. Ahhh, life was so simple. And no artifacts.

[hello_hello]

I've got four 1TB WD Black drives I bought about a year ago, which I intended to use to replace the existing drives when I upgraded this PC, which I also intended to do about a year ago..... now I'm waiting for the next flavour if Intel CPU before I do it.

I'd never, ever, ever, ever, ever, ever, even contemplate the possibility of considering the idea of going back to running single drives in a PC again. Both PCs here have four drives running as two RAID-0 volumes and whenever I work on video files, especially large ones, I try to put the source on one RAID volume and the output on the other and the drives just tick along letting me continue to use the PC as though they're not doing anything. For straight remuxing jobs I try to do the same.... all else being equal (and taking a rough guess) if the drives are fairly empty it takes 30 seconds to remux a 4GB file. Two single drives would take about 1 minute, and a single drive doing both reading and writing would probably take about four or five minutes. I can even rip 4 DVDs simultaneously while two DVD drives rip to one RAID volume and two rip to the other and still use the PC as though it's not doing much.

I've got a 40GB partition at the beginning of each RAID volume with Windows XP and programs installed (one's an image of the other in case one dies) so the OS system/programs partition is quite fast. The rest is storage and for working with files. I can really notice the difference when the drives start to fill up, speed wise, so I try to move finished video off them fairly regularly.

I've actually contemplated combining the four drives I currently have in this PC (4 x 500GB) as a single RAID volume with a small partition for Windows. I don't really have much else to do with them if I just replace them, and I'd have a remaining partition of over 1.5GB for some hopefully really fast work area. Then I could just use two 1TB WD black drives for the second RAID volume which would give me another 2TB of work space/storage and keep the other two I bought for the second PC, but I'm not sure if that'd be getting a little carried away....

Personally I think USB3 is a better idea than eSata for external storage, unless you're doing something over the top or want to run external RAID etc. USB3 is backwards compatible with USB2 and every PC has one of those, so you can plug your external device into any PC even if it runs slow, whereas eSATA.... not so much. eSATA tends to be a little more "finicky" too, based on my limited experience, the cables are short and fiddly, and they can tend to unplug more easily. Plus if you're like me and use docks which take two or more hard drives, for an eSATA dock like that to work, the eSATA controller needs to support port multiplying, and most don't seem to, whereas with USB it just works. Currently I'm using docks which can connect via USB2 or eSATA, as USB3 hadn't arrived when I bought them, but I'm planning on replacing them with USB3 docks when I upgrade the PC. USB3 PCI-e cards are already pretty cheap. Well I do have one USB3 dock, and it's the one I use first.

I wasn't trying to recommend WD Green drives for video work as such, although I haven't had any problems with mine so there's no reason why they shouldn't be fine, but personally I go for faster internal drives and use the Green drives for storage. Because they're cheaper, speed isn't so much of an issue they're a lot quieter than 7200RPM drives.

[sanlyn]

@hello_hello: read with one drive and write to another. Tried it just now. Yep. Works as advertised. Made my day.

[hello_hello]

Yeah.... one drive reading while another writes can be up to 4x faster than a single drive reading and writing as it doubles the speed by dividing the job in two, but because the heads of a single drive doing both jobs need to move back and forth to read and then write, that'll slow a single drive down even more, whereas two drives can read and write contiguously. The same principle applies to a single RAID-0 volume vs 2 x RAID-0 volumes, only because there the work is already split between two (or more) drives, the RAID-0 volume should be around twice as fast as a single drive to begin with.

If ever you want to try RAID-0, it should be fairly easy. I'd assume the SATA controller in your new PC supports it. Once you combine two or more drives as a RAID-0 volume in the BIOS/RAID setup, Windows is oblivious to it and just sees them as a single drive or RAID volume, which you can partition and format in the usual way. From there you can probably image your existing Windows/programs partition and restore it to a partition on the RAID volume.

The only tricky part is finding imaging/cloning software which supports RAID volumes. As long as the imaging software can work from within Windows though (I still use on old version of Norton Ghost which does) it works fine and doesn't need to support RAID as such. It sees the RAID volume as a single drive just as Windows does, so you can image a single drive and restore the image to a RAID volume etc. That's one reason I have Windows installed twice. If I want to image the Windows/program files partition, I boot from the second RAID volume so I can image the first, but I'm still doing so from within Windows.

Lots of people will tell you RAID-0 is a bad idea because every time you add a drive to a RAID-0 volume you increase the chances of failure (if you have two drives it's more likely one of them will fail at any point in time than it is a single drive will fail) but I don't think it's an issue. When I first built this PC one RAID volume started playing up almost immediately, because the pair of Seagate drives I used had firmware issues, but I replaced them and haven't had a problem since. My original plan was if one drive failed in a RAID volume, I'd replace them both and keep the surviving drive for storage, but it simply hasn't happened yet, and on average the two PCs here are running at least 12 hours per day and have done so for at least five years. In fact one of them is always on with an external drive attached to it for downloading. Every so often I want to change hardware etc, so the external drive is moved to the other PC and it becomes the 24/7 PC until I need to work on it.
The four RAID-0 volumes between the two PCs here consist of pairs or WD, Seagate and Samsung drives.

Apparently the Green drives aren't supposed to be suitable for RAID. I can't remember exactly why.... it's something to do with the RAID controller needing to regularly check the RAID volume and the Green drives don't respond fast enough when they go into low power mode, so the controller reports errors when in reality they're working fine (or something like that), but I did run a pair of 1TB Green drives as a RAID volume for a while (an older PC which died due to MB failure) and never had an issue with them. It might depend on the RAID/SATA controller being used.

[SixFiftyThree]

This probably deserves its own thread, but since there's such a great discussion here, I think it's the right place. Basically, I'm in the process of upgrading my PC. Here's the setup I planned, with all hardware already purchased -

Internal:
1) WD Black 500GB - OS Drive (XP 32-bit)
2) WD Blue 500GB - General/Scratch (partioned?)
3) WD Blue 1TB - Capture/Working Drive
4) SATA drive caddy - for WD Green 2TB backup drives

Also extra WD Black 500GB for OS backup/replacement. Drive caddy was chosen because a) no eSATA on my mobo, and b) no AHCI support on XP, which controls port multiplying, so no external multi-enclosure possible. Unless I mod the OS which I'm not keen on. Please correct me if I'm wrong. No hotswap without ACHI either, I believe, but I can live with that.

So anyway - this was the plan, for lossless/HuffYUV. But now I may be upgrading to a card with only full uncompressed ability. Thus RAID is thrown in the mix. For HD, no question it's necessary. But let's say only SD is the current requirement - surely a modern WD Blue 7200rpm drive would have enough write speed to handle uncompressed SD? Or if not, or if I went with RAID for HD capability, how should I change my setup? Keep in mind, the OS must remain Windows XP.

I'm thinking 2x WD Red in RAID 0 to replace WD Blue 1TB. Really hope to get some advice on this from you guys, thanks

[hello_hello]

SixFiftyThree,
XP does support AHCI and all the goodies which go with it such as hot-swapping and port multiplying. The issue is whether a particular controller supports it. I've got three different SATA controllers in this PC. Intel, JMicron and Silicon Image. Only the JMicron supports port multiplying and it works (I'm running XP). Newer Intel controllers may support it, although if they do I'm not aware of it. I'm fairly sure Silicon Image have a chipset or two which do. Pretty much all SATA controllers support hot swapping these days.
If the MB has an Intel chipset you may need a PCI-e SATA card to give you an extra couple of SATA ports which support port multiplying, but for me, USB3 has generally made eSATA obsolete. I don't use caddies, just USB or eSATA drive docks. Something like this:



I've no doubt a single hard drive can keep up with most video capturing/editing requirements, but the issue might be.... can it keep up and do other things at the same time? So then you dedicate one drive to this job, another to that job, and what you end up with is a bunch of single drives running at single drive speed. Why not at least combine a couple of them for double the speed of a single drive?

Anyway..... I ranted on about my setup enough earlier, but I installed Windows on a partition on one RAID volume and then again on the other. I wanted to eliminate any dual booting mess, so I installed Windows on the first RAID volume with the second RAID volume disconnected. Once it was done I disconnected the first RAID volume and installed Windows on the second. That way each Windows installation basically remains obvlivious to the other. To choose the second Windows installation, I just tap the F12 key (I think) at boot time and select which drive/RAID volume to boot from using the BIOS boot manager. No need to spend money on a drive which just sits on the shelf to backup the OS.

Trust me.... once you go RAID-0 you'll never go back to single drives. Even things like booting Windows and opening programs is a lot faster when there's two drives doing the work of one. And RAID-0 combines the two (or more) drives so 2 x 500GB drives = 1 x 1TB RAID-0 volume.

[themaster1]

The problem with raid0 (for me at least) is that all the drives you put will be aggregated in the raid array thus you can't read these drives on other computers if needed or am i wrong ?

Are there mobo's with which you can set a raid0 array + hdd using ahci drivers ? I guess you'd need 2 separate chips to control all that.

[SixFiftyThree]

hello_hello, I appreciate your reply. Aside from having the right controller though, you still need the AHCI driver which isn't native to XP. It's what people have trouble with, resorting to modded installations ie. slipstreaming. There's no generic AHCI driver like newer Windows have. So I've read at least, my knowledge is a bit lacking here. Since you're running XP, I presume you had no problems like this.

Anyway, I was looking at a USB 3.0 dock like that as well, just as another option. I like the caddy better since I prefer not to have exposed drives. But suppose I take the USB 3.0 route instead, I assume that hot-swapping, and multi-bay enclosures, should be a simple affair? I'll research it myself but all insight is helpful.

Regarding RAID, I'm interested in it but would still insist on an independant OS. I should mention I know little about it, which is to say I know of the types. Ideally I'd have only 2 drives in RAID 0, with the other two responsible for OS and General. Is this possible? Thanks.

[hello_hello]

The problem with raid0 (for me at least) is that all the drives you put will be aggregated in the raid array thus you can't read these drives on other computers if needed or am i wrong ?

How often would you be likely to need to do that though? Maybe if the motherboard exploded or something, but other than that.....
If you put them in another PC with the same SATA controller you could probably read them, but I've never tried it myself, or if you were really paranoid you could install a PCI-e SATA card capable of RAID, and then by moving the card to another PC along with the drives it shouldn't matter which PC they're in. Ultimately though, you shouldn't be storing anything on a PC you're not willing to lose unless you've also backed it up, whether you run a single drive or RAID.

Are there mobo's with which you can set a raid0 array + hdd using ahci drivers ? I guess you'd need 2 separate chips to control all that.

RAID mode is AHCI mode, if that's what you mean. As an example, the Intel controller in my MB has six SATA connectors which can be configured to run in RAID mode, but if I connect three drives and configure two of them as a RAID volume, the third just runs in AHCI mode as it normally would.

[DB83]

Well this topic seems to have now taken a life of its own.

While the discussion about Raid may be valuable, it was not part of original intent and anyone looking for such information on this subject is hardly to find it within this thread just by searching the forum.

Returning to the topic it seems to me that the 'jury' is undecided. So I will stick to 'Black'.

Now what is your favourite flavour of chips (Crisps as we call them) ?

[SixFiftyThree]

So I will stick to 'Black'.

Blue is just fine too, and cheaper. For DV and occasional lossless, you don't need more than that. Hell, DV is fine on just about anything, and HuffYUV isn't that demanding either. There's more to preventing dropped frames than drive performance.

Now what is your favourite flavour of chips (Crisps as we call them) ?

Chilli.

[hello_hello]

hello_hello, I appreciate your reply. Aside from having the right controller though, you still need the AHCI driver which isn't native to XP. It's what people have trouble with, resorting to modded installations ie. slipstreaming. There's no generic AHCI driver like newer Windows have. So I've read at least, my knowledge is a bit lacking here. Since you're running XP, I presume you had no problems like this.

Yeah for XP you need to install the SATA chipset manufacturer's drivers when you install Windows. It asks for third party drivers from a floppy while it's installing, but if by slipstreaming you're referring to adding service packs and drivers to an installation disc (and it's been a few years since I've made mine) you can definitely slipstream the AHCI/RAID drivers into one. Third party drivers need to be in a certain folder on the disc, and I'd need to dig mine out to refresh my memory as to where, but if they're on the disc Windows will install them along with all the generic and other third party drivers the disc contains. Here's a couple of links:
http://www.maximumpc.com/article/how_to_slipstream_your_xp_installation?page=0,1
http://www.sevenforums.com/tutorials/72185-sata-drivers-slipstream-into-windows-xp-cd.html

Anyway, I was looking at a USB 3.0 dock like that as well, just as another option. I like the caddy better since I prefer not to have exposed drives. But suppose I take the USB 3.0 route instead, I assume that hot-swapping, and multi-bay enclosures, should be a simple affair? I'll research it myself but all insight is helpful.

Assuming SATA works as it should and the SATA chipset supports port multiplying (I don't think the many of them do) then it's probably no different to using USB3 in many respects. I've had some odd eSATA issues though, such as only being able to hot swap drives a few times before the PC stops recognising a newly connected device and I have to reboot, but maybe that's just the SATA chipset in this PC. USB3 just works, and swapping drives is just a matter of turning off the power switch on the USB dock first.
I do find the eSATA cables annoying myself, but it probably wouldn't be so much of an issue using caddies, however you can't plug your SATA device into your TV to use it's media player to watch video. I can plug a USB dual drive dock into my TV/Bluray player and they'll happily read/play the contents of both drives.
The drives being exposed have never been an issue for me. Exposed to the open air they probably run a little cooler anyway.

Regarding RAID, I'm interested in it but would still insist on an independant OS. I should mention I know little about it, which is to say I know of the types. Ideally I'd have only 2 drives in RAID 0, with the other two responsible for OS and General. Is this possible? Thanks.

Yeah, you can have combinations of single drives and drives in RAID volumes if you want to, but if you have a RAID volume it doesn't make sense to me not to take advantage of the speed for running Windows and programs. I made a 40GB partition on mine, and even with XP installed along with all the programs I use, it's still got 28GB of free space.
As I mentioned before once the drives are set as a RAID volume, Windows just sees them as a single drive, so you can image your Windows partition/drive just as you normally would (another reason for using a small partition for Windows). I use an old version of Norton Ghost to read the Windows partition on the first RAID volume and write the image file to the second. The image file can still be restored to a single drive if need be, but doing it that way it's pretty fast. Five to ten minutes to create the image file, then five minutes or so again to restore it.

My last RAID-0 rant for the moment..... having a single RAID volume is a good idea, two is even better, but if you have combinations of RAID and single drives, whenever you move files from one type to the other, the RAID volume can only work at single drive speed. It's just something to consider of if you move large files around a lot. I'm painfully aware of it every time I copy files from the internal drives to a single external eSATA/USB3 drive.