I am going to be working on a hugeproject in HDV, and need an effective storage solution. I was thinking of acquiring 4 750gb SATA II drives and raiding them... This seems to be the cheapest solution and the most effective. Can these 4 hd's be put into raid 0 mode to have a total of 3 tb total?

Yes, it would be 750 x 4 .. but do realize that if something happens to one of those drives you will loose all the info on all the drives. you could do a raid 5 and have 2,250 gigs of safe storage and if something happens you just need to replace the drive and rebuild the raid (take half a day, including going get a replacement drive ;) )

yeah safer is always better in my book. Is there any way to increase the storage capacity by adding more drives, even though the motherboard only allows for 4 sata slots...?

Umm additional controller cards but I don't know how or if raid 5 is handled accross different cards.. my first thoughts are no.

On way to get RAID 5 would be to get a RAID controller. They are like a controller card, but with added RAID functionality. Quality/performance differs between these cards, but it may not be a big deal.

So you might have like 8X320gb drives on a 8-port RAID controller, all RAID 5.

The drives do need room in the case, power and cooling, so that might add to your cost.

2- An alternative would be to backup your project file. If your hard drives go kaput, you can re-capture off your HDV tapes. As far as I know, many NLEs can't do this for HDV but some can.

3- With RAID 5, RAID capacity = (number of drives - 1) * capacity

Thanks for the detailed info Glenn. Are there any raid controller cards that you would recommend? I am looking for something that can handle 5-8 drives. I have a contact that can get 250gb sata drives for 25 bucks a pop, so my hd solution can turn out to be pretty cheap considering I know what raid controller to get. Thanks

One thing I do with items that I don't know much about is go to newegg.com and read the reviews... if they have a good rating by lots of people that's usually trust worthy as most people tend to only complain so if lots of people are bragging you got to figure that's a pretty good sign.

I don't have much experience with setting up RAID controllers myself so you're probably better off consulting people with more experience. For example, there's lots of good information at storagereview.com on the website and in their forums. You might want to find the cheapest product on newegg.com, and then do a search on the storagereview.com forums to see what people are saying.

Since you aren't running a server or really demanding video (i.e. uncompressed SD/HD)... I don't believe you need a more expensive RAID card that would have higher performance. The cheaper RAID cards do use up more CPU cycles... but I believe the CPUs are so fast now that they just gobble that up. You're talking about just a few percent difference... which is not a big deal.

I have a contact that can get 250gb sata drives for 25 bucks a pop
That's such a good deal it sounds like they fell off the back of a truck... 25bucks/pop may be possible with rebate deals, but you're usually limited to 1 rebate/household??

Regardless, do make sure that all the drives are matched/indentical... otherwise performance will be poor.

yeah i've startd my review on a few raid controllers, around in the 400-600 dollar range, which can handle 8-10 drives. My contact that can getthose drives knows the CEO of a data storage/hardware company that buys lots of hd's in bulk and eventually have no need for them. Thats how it so cheap for me to get them.

Thanks for the info!