So I am piecing my new MacPro together and am wondering about hard drive options.

I will be cutting mostly XDCAM footage in its native format or in ProRes. Hard drive speed is important, but I have been fine doing this workflow on a MacBookPro with FW800 drives, so clearly it doesn't have to be the fastest.

My plan is to buy the stock config 2.8 8 core from Mac then add stuff from other vendors. My biggest priority is redundancy, with some type of RAID system that is writing to 2 drives. Should I be getting internal drives to do this, or should I just have 1 internal drive to run my system (which I would back up on a firewire drive periodically)? I have heard people talk about eSata arrays. What I need is about 1tb of useable online storage (meaning 2tb....if its mirrored).

Thanks,
B

I'm not too sure about RAID configurations, but ALWAYS have an external drive as a full backup. And never run any software off of an external drive.

Here's my drive configuration on a 3 GHz dual, quad core - all internal.
350 GB system drive
500 GB drive for storing useful graphics, files, movies, etc.
2 (two) 500GB drives striped together, RAID 0 to make a 1 TB internal drive.

Works great and will play back your XDCAM or ProRes files without problems. You won't be able to play back uncompressed HD without an external 5 drive or more SATA RAID or equivalent.