An 80 gig, 7200 spin, ATA100 is great for video. Get a solid brand, IBM Deskstars have a 5 year, unconditional warranty. Seagates are great too. Maxtor and Western Digital have the highest failure rates, but then again, they are much, much cheaper. www.pcnirvana.net has great prices on Deskstars and other drives.
SCSI is for those very serious about editing, it offers stable throughput, faster/more consistent speeds, and longevity of drives in most instances.
RAIDS are collections of hard drives that act as one large drive, or backups of several drives, depending on the RAID format. There are IDE Raids, and SCSI raids. I'd recommend sticking with a single drive until you really know the ropes.
Use the second drive as a secondary master, the IDE system is only as fast as the slowest drive on the system. Make SURE you have ATA100 rated cables. They are thinner, and use 2 pairs of wire rather than one pair. The computer store folk should know what you need. There is an article on how to configure these drives at www.sundancemediagroup.com/basicDV.htm, or at http://www.creativecow.net/articles/video_basics.html where you'll find the largest hardware and Vegas forums on the net.

visit www.storagereview.com regularly to find out which hard drives are best for you.

Ultimately it's down to money. You can spend loads on a 15,000RPM SCSI drive and controller (Seagate Cheetah X15-36LP is the best drive at the moment)

or you can go down the I'll get the best value / performance / capacity compromise, which is a 7200RPM EIDE drive.

personally I recommend the IBM Deskstar 60GXP - I use two of the 40GB models in my system, and push a hell of a lot of tracks off them.

I've had a nightmare with a maxtor drive failing.. so I wouldn't recommend that path, although many have better luck.

The IBM's are surprisingly good value also!

Jason

I have had great luck with the Maxtor external firewire drives. These spin at 5400 rpm, and the SF Knoledge Database states that external firewire drives are not supported (not sure why they state this). I have three of these drives daisy chained, regularly capture/render to them interchangeably with no problems, no dropouts, dropped frames, etc.

They are a bit more expensive than equivalent internal models, but, ease of hookup (no more complicated than plugging in your DV Cam) and portability make them very useful to me.

If I need to create some space to rerender a large file, it's no problem to pull one of these drives (or the first firewire in the daisy chain to pull all three), plug into my second system, and transfer large files I don't want to lose, but must move so that I can capture/render more footage.

Works for me.

Good luck. Hope this info is useful to you.

Caruso

the advantage to RAID is not decreased render times. the cpu is usually the bottleneck in that situation. RAID 0 gives you better hard drive performance so you can have more tracks playing at once. RAID 1 gives you increased data integrity since if one of your drives fails, you can recover the lost data. RAID 0+1 gives you both.

- ben (cheesehole)

Like Caruso, I have an external firewire drive. It is 100 GB, 7200 rpm and using a disk speed utility, it moves faster than my ATA100 drive. I've experienced no dropped frames during capture. I can't remember where I got it, but it was about $325 (got through pricewatch.com). It's also nice because I can put it on my laptop too!

I have 2 7200RPM 60gig Western Digital ATA 100 drives in RAID 0 configuration. I also have 2 ADS Pyro Firewire IDE enclosures daisy chained. All 4 use removable racks, so that I can hot swap the physical drives (although you DO NOT want to do this with the RAID unless both drives are replaced together).

Currently, I have my clients buy drives large enough to hold at least twice the length of their project. Then, I attach a rack to the drive and plug it into one of the ADS enclosures. I keep the main project files on the client's drive (attached to the firewire) which includes imported avi's and wav files, and do rendering to the RAID drives. I can work with many clients in this fashion, and they keep their own drive as backup when the project is finished.

I have 4 clients available to me currently, and 4 extra rackmounts lying around.

So far, I've had no problems with Maxtor or Western Digital. Although, on my other (regular) computer after 2 years one of my WD drives failed. I called the company and at no extra cost other than shipping, they sent me a new replacement drive, which has been working perfectly for the last 6 months.