How would you do it? (config for CS5)

[William Koenig]

Hello,

I'm upgrading to Production Premium CS5 from CS4. I run it on a Alienware 17x laptop: 2.53 Quadcore, 8 Gb RAM at 1006Mhz (Tapped out), 2x 1gb NVIDIA 290M (I think.) SLI Enabled GPU, 640Gb RAID 0, Vista Ultimate 64-bit.

I have seen posted:
7,200 rpm for OS
7,200 rpm for Scratch/renders
RAID 0 for media files

I am thinking of picking up a eSATA drive for my media files. The RAIDed drives are both 320 Gb 7,200 rpms.

My questions are:

Would I get significantly better performance by "deRAIDIng" my drives and configuring one for the OS and the other for scratch disks?

Also, for the eSATA drive, would you go for a RAID 0 or would a 7,200rpm drive have speeds close to the limitations of the eSATA interface itself?

Lastly (contingent on the answer of the second question), if a RAID 0 for the eSATA is overkill, should I get a RAID 1 just for the redundancy?

Not really too concerned about $, looking at G-Drives.

I would love to hear anyone's thoughts on the above, or your thoughts on how you would build on my system, and configure the drives. I have a firewire 400, eSATA, a couple USBs, and an Express Card 54 (for possible eSATA adaptors) to work with.

One last thing to add. In the projects I have made, I tend to add effects, titles, and slight letterbox matte to the entire project or timeline (the entire project is rendered), so we can assume that the entire project when exported, short or feature, will be affected in some manner and read from the scratch disk renders, not directly from the media files on a drive.

Thank you,

William