QUESTION: About setting up SSD for OS and disk drive for files

[rshores84]

Here's my specs:
1.) Asus Rampage Extreme IV X79
2.) Core i7 3930K
3.) 16GB Corsair Vengeance 8-8-8-24 Quad Channel RAM
4.) 256GB Samsung 830 SSD
5.) MSI Lightning HD7970
6.) In-Win 1200Watt Power Supply
7.) Windows 8 - 64Bit
8.) Thermaltake Frio CPU Cooler
9.) Thermaltake Level 10 Battle Case
10.) DVD-RW Drive

Here's my question. I am considering setting up a second 2-3TB HDD for video streams and other random files. I'm a part time photographer and an avid gamer, but here lately I'm getting extremely sick of hackers in some of the games we play and I want to start recording our teams gameplay in order to report and also post some of it on YouTube.

I have no clue about RAID setups or if I even need to setup my system in RAID.
I basically just want a second hard drive to save my recordings, documents, pictures,and so on. I want to keep my SSD for my OS and my games.

Sorry for the stupid question, but I figured someone on here with some spare time could lead me in the right direction.

Also if you want let me know what you think would be the best secondary hdd for my setup. As of now I'm considering a western digital black 64mb 7200rpm 6.ogb/s.

Thanks guys and go easy on me, I'm still learning.

StOBeR
www.FLaTLiNeRz.us

 

[smorizio]

raid is not needed unless you dont want to take a chance and lose work data. most home raids are with people with a few older smaller drives that toss them into a build to make one larger drive. the wd black is a good choice for a drive. but keep the install simple for yourself. keep it as a standard drive. just plug it into one of your open sata ports and then give the drive a letter in windows and start saving your game clips. if your going to use fraps or another screen capture try setting it up so that the program compresses the avi file for you. a few min of frapping can get real big real fast.

 

[Soda-88]

WDC Black would be a fine choice for your needs. If you want to capture your gameplay, FRAPS is the best tool for the job. All you need to do is plug the new HDD in, format it to NTFS (right click Computer>Manage>Disk Management, if required, initialize it as MBR).

You will also need a video editing software capable of rendering videos in MP4 format (H.264/x264) since FRAPS captures with low compression codec, making the files pretty big.
If you don't like paying $37 for FRAPS there are free alternatives such as Bandicam.

As for the video editing software, I'm using Sony Vegas which is rather expensive, but feature rich tool. Free alternative would be Lightworks, but I'd suggest you to do some research on video editing software and decide for yourself what you want from it because some of the editors are quite complicated to use for a newbie.