I have a question regarding my current setup, and how to maximize its efficiency. I have 1 internal 200g 7200rpm drive, 1 200G external USB2.0 drive, and 1 eSATA 500g exteranl drive(1.5Mb/s). My question is, how should I use this setup? Obviously, the os will remain on the internal drive, but what about captured .m2t? What about cineform intermediates? Which drive should I render out to? Also, hypothetically if the eSATA drive where really a 2 drive Raid 0, would that change the answer to the previous questions? Sorry for all the ? but Im not sure how to proceed. Thanks in advance!

My suggestion is:

Internal disk: OS & programs
External e-SATA: media
External USB: backups, and infrequently used files, stock footage, etc.

and add a 2-nd internal disk for projects, scratch, previews and page file.

My suggestion is:

Internal disk: OS & programs
External e-SATA: media
External USB: backups, and infrequently used files, stock footage, etc.

and add a 2-nd internal disk for projects, scratch, previews and page file.

When you say "media", do you mean where you capture files to, or both capture to and render to. Sorry!

Just capture to. The suggested additional disk can be used for rendering.