RAID Options
 

Have seen posts on adding storage HDD to Premiere NLE including good thoughts on use of external Firewire connected drives. Cost of RAIDs seems excessive but do offer insurance against losing data. Since I am not computer literate I like idea of Firewire external IDE's. How about stringing together external 7800 rpm IDE's on Firewire "bus" and buying some cheap automatic back up software. That way it seems you gain storage benefits and insurance against lost data (except for anything you did not backup) and easy swapping of HDD's of RAID's at much lower cost?? Would my proposed setup work ok with WIN 98SE OS or would there be some weird thing like 2 Gig limits kicking in?? Thanks for comments as I do need more storage.

Do not use a Windows 98 (or other Win 9x/ME) for such kind of
hardware/work. Stick to a more professional OS like Windows 2000
or XP.

RAID is expensive as you've found out (although cheap options
do exist) and don't add much for a backup. Why? Because it is
geared towards performance increase OR failure recovery. Why
is this different from a backup? Failure recovery was thought up
to protect you from hardware failures (drive is lost) so that you
don't loose your job (a REGULAR backup might almost give the
same kind of protection).

It, however, does NOT protect you against file deletion (whatever
kind, mostly just a quick delete without thinking about it). This
is were a backup comes in more handy. It will protect against
deletion since you haven't deleted the files from the backup.

If you want to protect against hardware failure something as
simple as keeping the source tapes and backup your project
files and other media files might suffice. Otherwise the most
inexpensive RAID solution is to get a Promise Ultratrak (or
Fasttrak??) card. It will support what you want if setup correctly
(RAID 1 is mirroring -> failure recovery -> you loose the space
on one harddisk for recovery work).

Otherwise another harddisk might be better for you indeed!

Good Advice
 

Rob, Thanks for input and good advice. As computer novice and forum reader I have learned to be careful of interactions among various components and software.

That is always true. Testing ensures you get good compatability.
With the newer operating systems things seem to get along
more and more though.

Lady B Executive Producer
 

The Lady B series will need to be very cost effective so what I save on RAID I can put into Lady B.