Adding Hard Drives

[**DONOTDELETE**]

I have 1 dedicated 60gb hard drive for video. But I've heard it's better to run 2 seperate hard drives, and stripe them together. My question is, should the second hard drive be the exact same hard drive as the first?

It's an IBM ATA 7200 rpm 60 GB internal hard drive. Do I need to by the exact same thing? would an external hard drive work well with the internal drive?

Also, what kind of software do I need to connect the two drives? RAID? What is it, where do i get it, how much is it... etc.

And is this something I can order and put together on my own, or do i need take it in. I'm comfortable installing my own RAM, but havent' done anything that extensive.

Thanks for your help

[Timmyjoe]

Could we get a little more information about your system. The reason, depending on which system you have, it may require different set ups. If you have one of the newer PowerMac G4, you have a place for four internal drives, if you have an older PowerMac G4, you may only have room for two. And when you say you have a 60gig drive for media, you mean a separate internal drive from your start up drive?

-Tim

[David]

If you're working in DV, there's no real need to stripe your drive so long as they are 7200 rpm on a ATA100 bus.

Save your money

[**DONOTDELETE**]

i don't know how new it is. it's not a dual processor. it's a single 867mhz. about 2 years old. Inside are 2 60gb hard drives. One is just used for system software and applications. The other is just for video.

I'm not using dv. I'm digitizing from throught the s video input of a matrox rt mac (av digitizing card).

but I have been having problems with dropped frames, and thought maybe striping another hard disk to my current one would help the performace.

thanks for the imput so far, please keep it coming

[Timmyjoe]

I must admit I am not up on all the latest striping hard drives stuff. But something I would look at before going that route is the "FCP an ambitious begining. . ." articles on Ken Stones site. There is a version if you use FCP 3 and a version if you use FCP 4. You can find them at:
http://www.kenstone.net/fcp_homepage/fcp_homepage_index.html

You will need to cut and paste that address in your browser.

Particularly read the part about the size of buffer to have on your media hard drive, in your case about 6 gig for the 60 gig drive. When you fill the hard drive too full, you can start running into dropped frame problems. If you set your system up as described in the articles, it is also easier to erase and re-initialize your media drive after each project.

Hope that helps,
-Tim