I am upgrading my edit workstation, which runs Vegas 7 on Windows 2000 Pro. The new motherboard is an Intel D975XBX2 with a quad core Q6600 CPU and 2GB RAM, which has onboard SATA and RAID. The old system had a 160GB boot drive, a 250GB video drive and an external USB/Firewire enclosure (single drive). The case is a full size Antec 1020 tower with a 400 watt power supply.

My projects tend to be an hour or less in length, with around 70-100GB of work files. To date my backup process has been to copy Vegas workfiles and video snippets to an external drive. When I'm ready to burn DVDs, I make a disk image and back that up. I haven't been backing up the tape captures (AVIs).

This system isn't used for HD yet, but I want to move into that this year.

The question is, what drives to buy and RAID level in order to maximize this system, with optimum render times and reasonable assurance that a single drive failure won't stop the show entirely? I'd like to budget around $500 for storage and reuse the existing drives.

Thanks,
Chip Gallo