I've got a difference of opinion. I have one mate who bought 2 hard drives for his computer but then ended up configuring them together so that they would run as one, supposedly to make the computer run better.
But then on the other hand another friend is saying no you need to get two different hard drives, one for your programs and whatever else, then one hard drive for your movie captures, audio etc.

Anyone here got any recommendations? I should hopefully be picking up a new computer soon and I'd like to get some advice on this.

- Dave.

Ideally one would have one hard drive for the OS and applications and another (or more than one depending on how much video you have) for storing ALL of your media.

Storing video media on the same drive as your OS can slow your system down.

Using both drives as one (striping) can be bad if it is your OS drive because if one drive in the stripe goes kaput then you loose everything.

That is why if you do stripe drives together it should be as media drives - media is usually replaceable by recapturing the footage.

Your edits and other documents are harder to recreate.

-Chris
Studentfilms.com

yeah. I agree with Chris. The hot thing to do with Mac G5s is to stripe the two internal Serial ATA drives and the run the system from an external drive. This will give you twice as many real time streams in FCP (depending on the system).

But yeah, keeping the OS separate from media is generally a good idea.