N00B RAID Question

[alcattle]

I am building a DVR. I want a small drive for OS and games/software, then I am thinking about 2 large drives for data. I want speed and seemless saves so I can point to the Drives/RAID and tell software to save files here. These are large TV and some Movie files. Can I use 2 320gb Seagates and get one big fast drive? Also the small drive will go on the IDE with the DVD-burner and the 2 drives will be SATA

 

[cattbert]

While raid 0 provides increased throughput, from my experience with my tv tuner cards (previously ATI tv wonder pro and now ATI TV 650), even on the highest setting the recording function does not need the speed of raid. It would probably not be worthwhile implementing raid just for this, as with raid 0 you would be doubling your chance of losing all of your tv and movies if one drive fails (or just something goes wrong with the array ... I previously had 2 sata drives in raid 0 as my OS drive and a couple times had a scare with the controller reporting errors ... luckily for me I was able to recover the array both times). The only practical advantage it would provide in the situation you describe is not having to move files or change the "save to" directory once one got near to being full, but that is easy enough to do that I personally would not bother with raid for what you want to do.