Why stop at 2 drives?
;-)A

4 x internals and 4 x externals. Total [ without the C: system ] 780gb. AND I'm thinking of more . ..

Grazie

Grazie -

You running into any heat problems with 4 internal drives? How many fans?

Greg

Fan on MOBO; 2 case fans; never seen heard the 2nd fan kick in. HDs at bottom front in front of the inlet ducts. Exit/exhaust top back. I can feel the breeze going into the pc through the front. Gues the movement is diagonally fron bottom front to top back.

If you use two drives and your "C" drive is 30 GB or less, be sure to direct your rendering and capturing to the larger drive. If you forget to do this, your smaller drive will fill up fast and capturing and rendering will stop. I have three HD's.
Burt

I use three drives and at the moment my main drive for capturing, editing and rendering is a 300GB Firewire drive. And it is only a 5400RPM unit too. BUT - I've not noticed it being any slower than my other drives, whether internal or external(others are 7200rpm). I'm not rendering anything longer than a few minutes though.

In addition to multiple drives, partition your first drive into C: and D:. Make C: relatively small (10 Gbytes or less) -- enough to hold all your program files. Then, set up all your applications to place their data on the D: (or some other) drive.

Many advantages to this approach:

1. You can use an image backup program to backup your C: drive without needing a huge backup device or dozens of tapes or DVDs (depending on what you use as backup media).

2. You can backup your data easily, especially if you move your My Documents directory to the D: drive and make sure you set all your applications to place their data in that location. You can use the Microsoft "Power Tools" (free download) to easily move most major Windows folders to the D:\My Documents directory.

3. You can speed up rendering and all sorts of other video operations by always using a target disk that is physically a different disk from the one used to hold your captured video, photos, and sound. By having a separate partition, it is a little easier to organize this. Thus, I always capture to the E: drive (separate physical disk) and then render to the D: drive (the second partition on my first physical disk). I also have several Firewire drives and sometimes use them for this purpose as well on projects where I have 5-10 hours of captures.

>>...4 x internals...

*8* internals +1 external drive bay here... :)

Please see the thread below (including my reply) for additional info on configuring a system with multiple drives.

http://mediasoftware.sonypictures.com/forums/ShowMessage.asp?MessageID=306570&Page=0

great thread.

I'm running Vegas5b on a couple of Shuttle SB51g s. They're mini xpcs and have only one available PCI slot (mine contain sound cards).

What's the best way to string additional media drives from the Shuttle's three remaining (two rear, one front) firewire outlets-- or would it be better to gerry-rig something ala the ide controller schemes outlined here?

In other words, what's the downside to just stringing together external firewire drives from one of the onboard firewire spigots? (like the four WD160-200g drives ive got now, with a Sony DVD burner chained to the end of em...)

thanks

bt

I usually put Windows on one drive, the programs on another one, the other drive(s) are data tanks (video / audio files).
When I render, it's on a different drive from OS, progs and media employed in project if possible.

Six internal drives. 1 system drive, 2 120s in raid 0 forming my main Video drive of 240 G. 2 120s in removable cages and 3 more 120s sitting on the shelf. I will keep older projects on a removable drive until I am sure that I don't need to rework it. Then back it up and reformat the drive for the next project. The remaining internal is a 40 G that is still here from the early days of this system.