Planning a new machine, Hard Drive Suggestions wanted

[Magaman]

WIth the almost imminent release of new Mac Pro's, and my need for a new desktop to replace my aged windows machine, I'm starting to look around and get things planned out. As this will be a multipurpose machine I need some hard drive suggestions. THe primary use for the machine will be for HD video capturing via a Blackmagic Intensity Pro card. I'm also planning on getting a Panasonic HMC-40 camera as well. I will also be running bootcamp as I need windows for gaming. I've read various opinions and others Hard drive set-ups, my though was as follows (based off the new machines having 4 HD bays, which obviously could be more if there's a design change):
Drive 1: Standard shipped drive, MAC OS and Bootcamp partition.
Drive 2: 1.5 T Seagate or WD- Personal audio, image, video files (possible final projects)
Drive 3: 1.5 T Seagate or WD- Scratch, and maybe stock files(SFX and VFX files)
Drive 4: 2 T Seagate or WD- Time Machine of essential files or just manual back of essentials.

Now the big question is and I've seen mixed views, should I software Raid 2 of the drives for the scratch and stock stuff?? I do have various large space externals already so those could always be used as my back-ups. Any thoughts would be great, as I'm still a Mac newbie, and currently use FCP on a MBP so I'm not to up on its proper use with raids and multi drives, other then my externals.

 

[spinnerlys]

I quite don't understand why you need a capture card, the Blackmagic, as the camera records its footage as H264/AVCHD encoded video, which you can transcode via Log & Transfer anyway, and which might be faster than the actual capturing process with new Mac Pros due to their speed.

If you don't plan to edit uncompressed, there is no absolute need for any RAID, as the maximum data rate of the ProRes codec (compressed of course) is 330Mbit/s (41.25MB/s), but if you plan to run multiple streams at one time, it might be the better solution of course.
Or you edit with LowRes ProRes Proxies.

Sorry if I didn't answer your RAID question, but I was just thinking, that it might not be necessary, but beneficial nonetheless.

Do you really need the capture card though? What benefits does it offer over Log & Transfer?

 

[Magaman]

The reason for the capture card is I run a gaming site, so I need to capture Xbox 360 and PS3 gameplay footage. I guess i could also give the set-up without raid a few test, if need be turn two drives into a raid and then start using it for real work, but I doubt I'll be doing any crazy uncompressed work anyway.

 

[bigbossbmb]

You don't need to RAID the drives for the type of editing you'll be doing... Just capture all material as standard ProRes (not HQ or 4444). The quality will be great, file-size manageable, and it won't strain your disks very much... HQ and 4444 are overkill for what you are doing and will just waste space and bandwidth.