I think you're on track with having all of your project file catagories tied to unique physical drive systems.

With fault tolerance a non-issue for you, then you'll want three 2-drive RAID-0 (stripes) for maximum speed, with the 7th drive added to the array used for your scratch disks.

You might even take the extra step of getting 3 separate SATA controller cards for these arrays, and run your system off of the on-board controller. Most on board cards only control 4 drive as it is, so you're already looking at one extra controller board, I suppose.

That's pretty much what I've got planned. The system drive will run off the onboard controller, with the 7 x 1TB drives running off the Areca 1231 with 2GB cache RAM and the Battery Backup module... that added a quick $1200 to the system.

The problem with three roughly equal array sizes is that the video drive will fill up relatively quickly, while leaving the other drives virtually empty. So I guess I'll have to sacrifice some speed on the non-video drives to balance out the capacity. If I had more slots or was planning to utilize external drive arrays I could split the 1TB drives into 2 x 500GB and gain some speed, I suppose. Oh, well, everything's a compromise...

Thanks for the input.

For AspectHD, you are looking at 10-15MB/s per stream With a 7 disk array on a good controller, you should 300-400MB/s. Should be no contest for the Raid. You will find other factors limiting your throughput when using compressed HD on a fast array.

Mike, thanks for that perspective. Looks like much of what I'm asking about here is academic, then.

Appreciate the input as always.