[_dave_]

Just to throw my 0.02 in, I have only a small sample size in this area.

For video work, disks are probably going to be the limiting factor, unless some serious software effects are being put to use.

I have a few machines, one has a 2x80GB raid-0 setup. Another has 2 seperate drives, 120gb but identical for comparison's sake.

The raid-0 is _fast_, but only when conditions are right. This is usually loading levels or some such when playing games. For this, the RAID-0 rules.

Mostly when I am processing video, I am using TMPG or similar to encode sections of a source file into a destination file, for example, chopping the ad-breaks from a TV program, or encoding a capture in to a more suitable format for long term storage, eg DV avi -> Xvid. Or converting DVD video to 4.4GB for backup purposes, like using DVD2One.

For this task, the RAID-0 is really poor. It performs as basdly as a single, low spec drive, if not worse. The problem is that the same drives are used as the source & the destination, casuing the disks to spend most of their time seeking. This same problem is present with only one (large) drive.

Using two independent disks, processing times for this sort of task can be reduced substantially - now I am using 2 160GB SATA drives, and the job is done in about 1/3 of the time it used to take.

I expect using 4 drives to construct 2 RAID-0 arrays would provide further performance increase, but I've not tried this yet.

Hopefully this is worth knowing for you - reading one video file + writing another loves to have sepeate disks for the source and destination files, but this depends on what you are planning to do with your "Video Editing Machine".

Good luck,

dave.