My two cents...

I think trurly "removable" drives, those NOT firewire, rather any IDE drive placed in a removable drawer (about $30, needs open slot in fornt of your PC case, slips in like a CD drive) running off the PC's internal power supply make an excellent choice IF you're not editing on a laptop. If you are, then I guess a firewire (cross your fingures) with have to do. Either way, a good way to have virtually "unlimited" storage space.

As far as brand, aside from noise level and buffer size (much over rated) if you're going to buy the consumer grade (always what you see in retail stores and usually on web sites) there really is very little difference in quality.

RAID? Not a big fan. Really a personal choice if you want to go that route. A disadvantage is the drives as part of an array will be on all the time spinning way, meaning they're WEARING OUT faster, creating extra heat inside your PC case. If you have 400GB, surely all that doesn't need to be online constantly, so what's the advantage? I just don't see it. I prefer to swap out as needed.

Partition? No real advantage if you're using the drive for video editing. If you don't partition, then doing required defragemation takes longer... can be MUCH longer if you have one of those jumbo 200+GB drives, so that means you probably won't do it as often as you should.

Raid- No longer needed for speed or size in the real world.
Buffer- Mole hill
Firewire drives- personally not a big fan but the advantages are Laptop transfer and hot swap capable.

I like quality drive trays with Key and fan built in.
I prefer 60 gig drives because they are at a good price point. They don't get as hot and they format and defrag faster.
I can divide projects by tray.
Add drives as I need them.
I use one system drive of say 30 gig. partition the drive 10 gig and 20 gig. Put the OS on the 10 gig partition and use Drive Image to back it up on CD or tray drive.
This way if you get a corrupted OS you can be back up and running in less that 15 min with a reformatted 10 gig partition all files and programs intact.

That is my method anyway.
Cheers,
W

For the most part, RAID and partitions were methods used to get around limitations of old drives and old operating system limitations which don't really apply anymore. For that matter, defragging really isn't much of an issue anymore either. Most drives these days are big enough and fast enough for almost any imaginable situation.

As far as defragging taking a long time, i don't worry about this in the slightest since i rarely defrag. For one thing, even with severe fragmentation, my ATA/100 drives have no problem keeping up with a DV stream. For another thing, since i have three data drives, my usual practice is to keep a project on a drive, then when finished with that project copy the few files i may still need to one of the other drives, then delete everything on that drive. Without reformatting or defragging, the empty drive is now ready for use. The copying and deleting step usually takes a couple of minutes at most. Why bother defragging?

Raid- Not really necessary. I always hear people swear by them. But personally i think what ever performance gain you get is minimal if even noticeable.

Partition- I partitioned my system drive. 10gb system and 30gb that i only put programs and plugins on. Actually 40 gb system drive is over kill if you only have a few programs on a machine which i do. I use an 80gb drive for content and creation.

I use a series of removable storage drives for backup and rendering.

Firewire- I always hear it is a hit or miss situation even with the Oxford 911 chipset. I think there is a recent thread by SOFO detailing the problems others have experienced.

Buffer- Only time i think it comes into play is with office type of apps. I however do have a WD 80gb drive w/ 8mb but that was because the price was less than the 2mb that the store offered.

The DV datastream is a constant 3.5 MB/sec, which ANY drive these days can keep up with. I was even capturing and editing on my laptop with a 4500 rpm 10 GB drive. The only thing that matters is size. Get as big as you can get. Also, it sure is nice having an NT file system (Windows NT/2000/XP) so you don't have to divide files into 4GB chunks.

Of course, if you sometimes need to capture analog, and want to capture using something other than a DV codec, then you may need more performance (a lot more, in some cases).

You could fit a housing for the caddie in the PC and then have a FireWire CD case and fit a housng in there, giving best of both worlds. Works for me.