Video Editing: RAID 0 vs. source/dest. different drives

[jhammer569]

I'm building a new PC, got most components figured out:
CPU: Q9550
GPU: 2 x ATI 3650's (I trade across 3 monitors for a living)
Mem: Corsair DDR2 800 2x2gb
MB: ASUS P5Q-E
HD: 2 x WD640gb

Usage:
Besides trading (no games) & basic web surfing/email and occasional DVD watching, my major use will be home video editing.

Question:
1. Am I better off just having 2 drives. Have the large video (DV) data on one drive, and write the output to the 2nd drive?
OR
2. Have RAID 0 of around 300gb dedicated just to video editing, the rest of the drive space on both drives would be for everything else, not in RAID 0?

Major performance difference one way or the other? If RAID 0 barely gives a performance boost over option 1, then I'd go with option 1 to avoid the risk of RAID 0 data loss across both drives at once.

Tnx!

 

[BlueAcolyte]

Not a big difference, how valuable is your time? Maybe it's 5% faster at most. I'd pick option 1.

 

[Foxery]

Source/dest guarantees that every read and write is assigned to seperate physical drives, while RAID does not.

In the old days, IDE hard drives also incurred a delay when switching between the read heads and the write heads. Not sure if this is still true in 2008.

 

[BonzaiDuck]

That was the shortcoming of my RAID5 project, but I constrained myself by economizing on overall system wattage draw. Same reason I opted to stick with one high-performance graphics card instead of SLI for that project.

Otherwise, I might have used RAID0 off the motherboard for OS and program installations, and the RAID5 for data. I might have used two different drives, or a single drive and the array for the video work. Push comes to shove, I'm even thinking that a Firewire or USB 2 drive would allow me to do that anyway.

I'm still not getting into the nuances of the HD formats for video, and I'm still converting old analog VHS tapes to captured MPEG and burning discs from there.

So I might wonder about rendering from the MPG's being read off the same drive array. It isn't something I've taken time to measure. All I know -- is that my RAID5 with the older 3Ware 9650 is 3 times faster on the reads, and as much as 2 times faster on the writes.