I have somewhat of a dillema at hand.

I have a client I promised to archive a project for and have had to revisit the project several times in the past 2 months to make more copies or change something small, Each and every time I get paid well, and I get tons of referrals from this client, so its worth spending some bucks on. I am planning on buying a hard drive to archive this particular project on so i dont have to recapture from tape again.

Here is what I am debating. My main hard drive in my G5 is a 160GB drive. Its a perfect size for me, and stores exactly what I need it to with quite a bit of space left over. It is 2 years old, sees everyday use, and im somewhat nervous about this drive as my main drive for everyday work. Im thinking about turning this drive into my archive drive for this project, and buying a new main drive. Would it be worth the extra pennies and speed to get a 150GB WD raptor for my main drive as it is 10000RPM. Would I just be throwing my money out the window? could this get me another year or 2 out of this computer? or would I be better in investing in a little bit more ram and just get a cheap drive for my archive

System Specs:

Dual G5 2.5Ghz
2.5GB RAM
160GB Mac OS Drive
400GB Seagate for my video stuff

We acquired a similar system that was configured by someone else with a 10000 RPM drive. I wouldn't waste money on it if I were you. If it were me, I'd get another 400GB seagate and put your 150GB in an external Firewire enclosure. Checkout the Traydock from Wiebetech. It lets you put your disks in trays and swap them.

If you are willing to spend a little more, I'd get a LaCie or G-Tech. We have six (3 of each) for archiving and from time to time when an edit is needed on an old project, I just open up the the project and relink the files to the LaCie or G-Tech and edit directly form it. No need to transfer files backto your main capture scratch.

awesome.

thanks guys

We acquired a similar system that was configured by someone else with a 10000 RPM drive. I wouldn't waste money on it if I were you. If it were me, I'd get another 400GB seagate and put your 150GB in an external Firewire enclosure. Checkout the Traydock from Wiebetech. It lets you put your disks in trays and swap them.
What a waste of speed to put that 150G in a fire wire enclosure. Your transfer rates will diminish to around 1/3 of the normal speed. If you want to use an external disk use eSATA connections.

The 2.5GHz dual G5 doesn't have an eSata port so a PCI host card would have to be added. Also, the performance tests at Bare Feats on a single drive comparing FW800 vs Sata show marginal difference. Sometimes the FW800 is faster.

http://www.barefeats.com/hard51.html

This is probably beating a dead horse, although on paper the firewire 800 appears comparable to eSATA I haven't really found that to be the case. In fact often times I get better performance from FW400 than I have with FW800.

I imagine it has something to do with the controllers and drivers. But in production SATA has always outperformed firewire.

Firewire still has some benefits over SATA, more people have it so you can share it easier but if your not moving your drives around much I'd definitely go with SATA.