I did it the easy way, bought a SCSI medea 160 gig. It will pass 18megs per second and maybe more like 30 megs. Good for doing high definition or MJEPG not needed for Digital firewire capturing as you only need a 7200 rpm IDE DMA 5 drive to capture 3.43 megs per sec.
The Medea sucks up the high definition data stream tp file from the MY-HD capture card without any hiccups.

JJK

Technically you don't need a raid card to do raid in Windows XP. If you go to disk management utility by creating dynamic disks. Your not limited to raid 0 either, you could do raid 1 which is drive mirroring or raid 5 which is a fault-tolerant volume with data and parity striped intermittently across three or more physical disks. REDUNDANCY is good!!! If one of your drives crashes you still have your data, put in a replacement and wallah your raid will rebuild itself. You can have all this with out buying any extra hardware provided you have the ide controllers on your MB. Just look for a search in Windows help for "dynamic disks" Another way of saying raid 0 is striping your disk as that term is also used.

-zemote

Thanks for the input folks. Since I will doing 90% firewire import, I would have to agree with BillyBoy that setting a raid system would be akin to the sledgehammer / fly analogy.
So, I will proceed with my standard IDE drive upgrades, which leads me to a new question... is it posible to extend IDE cables? I ask because my PC case is getting a little crowded, and I would like to move my video HD's to a seperate case, with a seperate power supply (as mentioned in the original post). Eventually I will be moving my entire rack into a cooled closet away from my consle to cut noise. The only issue that will bring is monitor cables, which I will (dangerously?) assume can be extednded via a quick stop at CompUSA or similar retailer.

Thanks again for the help.

The monitor cables are no problem at all (250ft) . The IDE cables I don't know. Might have to go with a 1 gig network to each unit.

JJK

"So, I will proceed with my standard IDE drive upgrades" - VERY WISE DECISION. RAID for overkill, espcialy not fault tolerent, end EVEN MORE not Software RAID.

I use Raid 0 on 2 diffrent machines and I love it, never had any problems.

I'm with Jsnkc

I've got two Raid0s at home and 3 Raid0s at Blue Rocket. (4 are 2x200+ Gig IDE and one is 3x70 SCSI).

Haven't had a glitch with them. They are fast. Yes - maybe it is overkill at the moment, but I don't lose any space by having them running and it gives me headroom to do other things while an app is running.

As for losing data, I haven't lost any yet, one of the Raids works 24/7 and has been running for 3 years now. Vital project data is backed up daily (as opposed to AVIs or rendered images which can always be rebuilt from project data) onto either removable USB IDEs or a separate smaller IDE. But in 10 years I have never lost data from drive failure.

I set a scheduled task to run every night that runs a little batch file containing variations of this:
xcopy d:\projects\*.* h:\D-drive-backup /e /y /d

I'm all for Raids ...

My 3 cents worth (they are Australian cents and aren't worth as much :-)

Cheers

Another Aussie's 2 cents worth, I had my mobo raid 0 system die twice on me, ditched it, still using the same drive without hiccup.
Also unless you're using a SCSI RAID controller or one with it's own smarts it can be working against you, a lot of the RAID processing is done in the CPU, sure the raw disk I/O is faster but at the expense of CPU throughput so for rendering you might be going backwards.

I've just put a new system together. I started with a 160GB SATA Seagate ($120 online) for editting and attempted to reuse my maxtor 40GB 5400 rpm for the OS. The Maxtor was so slow and noisy it drove me crazy. I hadn't done installing half my programs and Win2K was already acting like a POS...ruining all the performance. Then CompUsa offered the same Seagate for $99. So I bit and go a 2nd one, switching to a RAID 0. The computer now runs like a rocket. I did have to switch to WinXp, since win2K doesn't support RAID 0 with SATA.

I have yet to try a video capture, so I don't yet know if i'm going to be burned with a "single drive" for both OS and capture. I'm also worried about heat, since I'm placing both drives together inside the case and I'm under-fanned...the drives get hot to the touch when they're really running for a long time, e.g., even for something as a simple full-system virus check.

Long and short, I'm as yet unable to give you useful feedback for video editting. But for overall performance, it makes a "huge" difference. I'd rather buy a 3rd drive for capture if I have problems. I'm never switching back. Of course you could buy a super-fast drive for your OS, but how can you knock a system that keeps all your storage and doubles your performance (RAID 0).

Note that I'm using the motherboard-supported RAID. $60 for an ATA raid controller is rather expensive, given that the newest motherboards are not much more than that.

Additional: I was unable to create a RAID 0 SATA using the Southbridge. Some kind of error installing the driver. I had to use the Promise controller instead. But all the latest motherboards support both.

As for switching your RAID to another system, I *believe* it is possible to install new drivers without restriping. But until I've done myself, I'm not going to say 100% certain :-/