Fewer Big Drives Or More Small Drives

[BarryGoffe]

I am building a new PC for video editing and need a fair amount of storage space. At the same time I am trying to make my PC as quite as possible. If I wanted about 500 GB of space, should i use six 80 GB drives with data striped across them (isn't this RAID 2?). Alternatively should I use three 160 GB drives or two 250 GB drives?

While I want the system to be fast, I value quiteness over speed since my office is currently in bedroom.

Thanks for your guidance,
Barry

 

[BarryGoffe]

That is "Quiet" and "Quietness" not "Quite" and "Quiteness".

My kingdom for a spellchecker!

-Barry

 

[Winchester]

I would go with fewer larger drives. Video files can easily get bigger than 80gb.

BTW: click the "edit" link on the far right on your post to fix your original.

 

[beatle]

I suppose it depends on your budget. RAID 5 (striping w/parity) controllers ain't cheap, but would prove faster in a 6x80GB setup. Personally I would get 2 250GB drives and keep them separate. Read from one drive and write to the other is faster than reading and writing to the same RAID 0 array. It'd likely be cheaper than multiple drives (RAID controller cost aside)