For a boot disk and for the items on your time line, this is a very good value for $100 US. It's not the bleeding edge.

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16822136296&cm_re=raptor_150gb-_-22-136-296-_-Product

Buy yourself two or more 2TB 7200 RPM drives from your favorite manufacturer for $109 to $150 US for bulk storage and move on.

Unless you'll be working with uncompressed HD video files, then RAID is completely unnecessary. An SSD for your boot drive will save some time when booting and loading applications, but it isn't completely necessary either. As was suggested, get a relatively small boot drive (128GB and up) and then get at least a couple of 2TB 7200rpm SATA II drives for data.

128 is way too small. If a HD is filled half way it is much slower. Half of 128 is 64 and 64 is easy to fill with just a few applications. 1TB drives are cheap and fast and hard to fill, so buy the 1TB and be ready for the future.

Sorry FishEyes but I agree with John.
My boot drive is 200 GB. and I'm only using 40 GB.
That's with several versions of Vegas & DVDA, Sound Forge, Photoshop and several other apps on it.

Mike

For highly compressed stuff, disk speed is way less important than CPU horsepower. However I'm experimenting with 10 bit 4:2:2 Sony YUV, and I can tell you and interesting thing which surprised me:

- the 10 bit 4:2:2 avis can play at full speed only from the faster one of my two internal RAID 0's ( one is 2 disk, the other -3-disk array).

Interestingly, when I use the BlackMagic Disk Speed Test utility, both the RAID's qualify (though the slower one being only capable of 25 fps, which is exactly what I need). The faster array is capable of well over 30 fps with 10 bit 4:2:2 YUV.

But that is outside Vegas - i Vegas, only previewing from the 3-disk array is possible at full speed and quality! Why not from the other one beats me - there doesn't seem to be much overhead as Vegas uses very little CPU power for uncompressed....

SSD is the way to go. My next system will have an SSD boot drive. I'd say 64 gigs would work for me right now .. . Raptors are good as boot drives but cost nearly as much as an SSD. Why not go for the future NOW. Currently using a 74Gig raptor for my boot drive. No problems. Runs smooth as silk. (The drive only cost me $50 at Fry's - a refurb .. I bought two -- one for a backup -- after a year, #1 has not failed yet.) Using about 40 gigs of space .. -- but I can see how with software growing in size that 128 SSD might be the future.

Thanks to everyone with lot of good feedback. Anyone experienced the following drive with Vegas for HD footage?.

http://www.bhphotovideo.com/c/product/568397-REG/Western_Digital_WD10000LSRTL_1TB_Caviar_Black_3_5.html

How to say this?
Hard drives are hard drives are hard drives. The differences between all the 1TB drives made for our purposes is minute. OK, I'll admit I'm kind of partial to the Samsungs but then again I've been able to buy them at a good price and they smell nice. Ask any group off experts which are the best and you'll get told with great authority that:

1) Western Digital drives are rubbish.
2) Hitachi Drvies are cr*p.
3) Samsungs are dogs.
4) You'd be stark raving mad to buy a Seagate.

I've had next to zero trouble with any of them. One problem with the Internet is people mostly post to complain and like all things you get clusters of failures so out of the zillions of people on the web there will be at least someone whose had ten drives from one manufacturer all fail in a week. The ONLY thing you'd want for video work is a 7200 RPM drive, beyond that it just doesn't matter. I use the 5400RPM drives for archiving because they're cheaper and seem to not get so hot in my toaster.

Bob.

Thank you Bob. What is your opening of Raid 0 / 1?. Should I care those in the video editing world for reading and writing video/audio files?. Lot of different technologies out there. More choices..... more confused to pick the right product I guess..

Hardware based RAID 0 has its place for speed but obviously you pay a price in reliability so there's no point having the speed unless you need it. RAID 1 gives you reliability but you get half the storage capacity.

Processing video is like trying to make water flow through a pipeline. Unless you know where the smallest diameter pipe is you can waste money making a pipe bigger. For what most here are doing disk speed isn't much of an issue. The current 7200RPM SATA drives are fast enough. Because most video today is highly compressed the data rates are low but the CPU overhead is high. So first place to spend your money is on a faster CPU and/or more RAM. Because of the long GOP nature of that compressed video I believe Vegas needs to buffer all the frames in a GOP in RAM so more of it makes sense.

Bob.

True.

But how would you explain what I wrote a couple of posts before in this thread?

With uncompressed 10 bit Sony YUV, my slower RAID 0 is capable of full fps (25 to be exact) playback outside Vegas. Why not inside, in the Preview Window?

Obviously some considerable overhead is in play here, meaning that HDD faster than theoretically sufficient is actually beneficial.

My faster RAID 0 can do well over 30 fps of the Sony 10 bit YUV outside Vegas, so it might sound like an overkill. But with Vegas overhead, it's just barely fit.

Piotr

"But with Vegas overhead, it's just barely fit."

How do you know the read speed is what's slowing it down?
Are you running Vegas in 32bit mode?

How much CPU overhead is your RAID 0 array using, some use quite a bit.

Bob.

Bob,

I'm running Vegas in 64bit mode almost exclusively. My RAID's use some 2-3% CPU each, according to HD Tune.

Piotr

"I'm running Vegas in 64bit mode almost exclusively"

I meant are you using 8bit integer or 32bit float.

"My RAID's use some 2-3% CPU each, according to HD Tune."

Even so if Vegas needs 99% of the CPU to keep up then the extra 2-3% might be enough to push it over the edge. Frames are either delivered on time or not. 1 dropped frame per second is quite noticeable but it never even seems to work out that smoothly, it always seems to me playback performance in Vegas is either 100% OK or pretty obviously not keeping up.

Still my reasoning still remains very simple. If anything running on your PC can playback the file without dropping frames then logically the disk system is fast enough. If for some reason any app is having an issue playing the same file I cannot see how a faster disk array is going to help.
Please though don't take my word for it, feel free to spend a kings ransom on a rack of 15K SAS drives connected over fibre. Your donation to helping stave off a double dip recession will be appreciated :)

On a more serious note if Vegas is buffering then that might create quite a load on the busses in/out of the CPU and to/from the RAM. If you are using a RAID controller card it maybe worth moving it to a different slot. Ages ago when I configured my SuperMicro system the integrator was very particular about what went in each slot because of this.
It could also be that between what Vegas is doing over the various busses and what the disk i/o is doing the disks can deliver the data but the buss cannot keep up. That creates a real problem because the disks cannot simply pause sending data even though they have some cache. In this case RAID controllers with lots of cache or better mobos may help. Both of thos options start to get expensive but clearly there's a reason why people pay big dollars for these things.
At that gets down to another problem. Very few PC users are affected by this, video games aren't pulling huge amounts of data off disks, us video guys and corporate database systems about the only markets for this. So it can pay dividends to use a systems integrator who knows what they're doing and has a record of building these kinds of systems. Throwing expensive hardware at the problem could be waste a lot of money that'd be better spent paying a markup to people who know what they're doing.

Bob.

"I meant are you using 8bit integer or 32bit float"

Oh, yes - my Neatvideo de-noising / sharpening render I do with 32bit floating point project settings, and render out to 10bit Sony YUV - this way, I completely avoid the plastic look and banding that may result from to strong noise reduction (the example you saw BTW, and judged as "plastic", was to 50 Mbps MXF to save upload time.

"Even so if Vegas needs 99% of the CPU to keep up then the extra 2-3% might be enough to push it over the edge"

I'd also think so, but with uncompressed avi (even 10 bit 4:2:2), the CPU never exceeds some 20% at playback - so the overhead/bottleneck lies elsewhere. Anyway, I know it for the fact that the same uncompressed 10bit avi that plays full 25 fps from the faster RAID, struggles at some 18 fps when played back from the slower one....

Even though, as I said, the BMD Disk Speed Utility qualifies both drives as 25 fps-capable.

Piotr

If anybody is interested, Newegg has the Samsung F3 1Tb drives through 9/6 for $69.
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16822152185
(I have two of them and have not seen any errors - last time they had them on sale, people here seemed happy with them).

mikey