I do a lot of multicam editing, and the tape dropouts are driving me nuts. So I'm building a portable harddrive acquisition computer.

I've got most of this figured out already -- small, Shuttle-sized, SATA hadddrives, two separate firewire buses, 2gig ram, excellent cooling fan(s) --

Only thing i'm scratching my head on, is the OS. WinXP? Win2k? Some flavor of Linux?
With two SATA drives (one dedicated to the OS and swap, the other to video files) that should take care of any potential Windows freaky behavior, right?

Back in my Win98SE days, I had a stripped down 20meg install running Canopus Mpeg encder boards on PIIs with only 256MB ram -- never had a problem. Once they went to XP, it went nuts.

I'm a Mac guy. I just need this thing to work without problems and spit out files ready for FCP...whether that be Mpeg-2, high bitrate h.264, etc.