I would say uise the SATA for capture. In general you should try to keep your OS on a drive away from any sort of editing/capture. Also, in theory, to should have a drive that is seperate from the capture drive to render to....and same goes for a temp drive. Having said that with the larger drives these daysit is concevable to mix and match. I have used my C drive (which is a SATA drive) to capure when I have run out of room on my dedicated capture drives and never had a probelm...but I would never want to try and capture everyhting to the C drive only.

I would say try to make that IDe drive your C drive - and you can partition it if you want so you have a parition that is for the OS and other programs and another partition that is for, say, renders and back up/projects. Take the SATA and make it your capture drive.

I believe if you set up your OS on a SATA drive it has to boot first in the Bios. You definitely need to see how your motherboard handles this.

If you are just sticking with the two drives, perhaps something like this

Drive 1
OS partition very small Imaged when OS changes made
applications partition 40 gig? Imaged when new programs added
remaining partition for data.

Drive 2
Entire drive as one partition.

Use drive two to capture video and render video to. This way your OS is on a separate physical drive from your OS/programs and you have less bottlenecks.

When you are done with rendering the video and just need to store it, move it to drive 1 and delete it from drive 2.

I have no idea if disk one should be SATA or IDE. If you are working with DV and IDE drive will keep up with rendering, so maybe that one for the media and the SATA for OS, because it may be slightly faster.

I’m not sure what the difference between 3 & 4 are in your example (i.e., what’s the difference between video capture and captured media?).

My current PC is configured as just three drives:

C: OS/Apps (74GB 10KRPM WD Raptor SATA150)
D: Stock Media / ACID Loops / MP3 Music (200GB 7200RPM WD SATA150)
E: Video Capture / Projects (2 x 250GB 7200PRM WD Caviar SATA II Raid 0)

I wouldn’t go crazy with a lot of partitions. Three should be enough so in your case I would partition the 250GB IDE as 50/200 and leave the 250GB SATA whole like this:

C: OS/Apps (50GB of 250 IDE)
D: Media (200GB of 250 IDE)
E: Video Capture (250GB SATA)

The SATA drive should be slightly faster which is why I chose it for Video Capture. Not because it is need for any particular capture, but you will also be previewing off this drive and rendering off the drive so you want it to be as fast as possible. You could always render to the 200GB media drive as well.

~jr

I'm currently using two Raid arrayed IDE 7200RPM drives for my OS.
Getting two SATA 10 000 RPM drives to re-do the same installation, would it make my machine much faster?

I just did a long post a few days ago (look under my user name and "backup"). Bottom line is similar to Busterkeaton and others: Keep the C: partition small, and use it only for apps and O/S. I usually keep it at about 7GB, and even that is more than I need. Do people really have 20-30GB of O/S and programs ??? I have about 50 apps installed, and my program files directory contains 2.2 GB. My Windows directory is 2.5 GB, although I could reduce that a lot if I got rid of all the Windows patch uninstall files (since I'm never going to uninstall any of these updates).

I use the rest of that disk for non-video storage. Then, put all your storage on a drive that is on a different IDE channel (your SATA drive is obviously a different channel, so that fits the bill).

"Do people really have 20-30GB of O/S and programs ???"

I using 15GB of my drive right now. Data is on another drive. So yes, 20-30 is conceivable. Keep in mind that as a hard drive % used increases, the less efficient it is. No technical papers I can reference on that, just what I have concluded from my observations. I like to keep mine less than 70% full. I'm at 55% right now. I think 7GB is a little small, specially if you are using XP.

I ended up using three physical drives while working on a long-form film project. One is the OS, one is an internal, larger capture drive. After capturing video I render avi's (with color correction, etc.) to a third drive (With audio alone, I work on a partition of the same drive as the OS).

If I make MPEG-2 files of the rendered avi files, I render them from the render drive back to the capture drive--so that the process is always going through a PCI card to another drive, not within the same drive.