What setup is best for Video Capture ?
7200rpm IDE drive, or IDE Raid, SCSI or SCSI raid

assume cost no object(though it alwasy is), without overkill which would be best?

I would like full frame capture at highest quality

If cost is no object then SCSI raid is definately the fastest. SCSI drives are available up to 15,000rpm and are definately faster then their IDE counterparts. A ton of money can be saved by going to an IDE raid setup. Tom's has done reviews of several drive configs and basically you get what you pay for. There are more things to concider then just speed. Whenever you use more then one drive to store your data to increase speed you decrease reliability, if any drive dies all your data dies. Same goes for increases in rpm, a 15,000rpm drive is more likely to die then a 7,200rpm. Anyway SCSI raid is fastest, followed by a single high end SCSI and IDE raid in the middle, and slowest is the single IDE drive.

The capture card is a lot more important then the drive. If you do a little math you can figure out the data rate needed by the drive to keep up with a mpeg2 stream. DVDs are around 4,000,000,000B and last for about 120 minutes or 7200 seconds. Divide 4 000 000 000 by 7 200 and you get about one half of one megabyte per second that must be recorded to the drive. Peak datarates could be much higher but even a single IDE HD can easily handle this datarate. What I'm saying is that the drive is less important then the capture card, at least with an mpeg2 stream. MJPEG would generate a much higher rate and take up a lot more room. What format are you planning to record in? What exactly are you doing with the system?

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Thanks for the response Lakedude. My foray into Video capture started with capturing a VHS commercial into streaming media for the web. I would like to be able to transfer analog to CD if needed. I am still "playing" at this point, and am unsure of where I will go with this. I was hoping to get a storage solution that keeps my options open. If I understand you correctly, the SCSI single drive is on par with or better than IDE Raid. Will it accomodate most Video Capture needs ? Limitations ?
Thanks for the help

A single 15000 SCSI will be roughly on par with a 2 disk raid zero. The advantage of a raid is that you don't need to stop at 2 drives. You can chunk in 3 or even 4 drives and continue to increase speed with a raid. Two drives will be not quite twice as fast as one and four will be almost twice as fast as 2. Of course with 4 drives you have 4 times the cost and 4 times the chances for a drive to go bad and trash all your data. You can set 4 drives up in a 2 plus 2 and mirror your data but that would be slightly slower then a 2 drive setup, cost twice as much, but be twice as reliable. I've got an all SCSI system with a 9G 10,000rpm IBM drive. SCSI is great but my new system is all IDE and the 60G 7200 IDE is faster then the old 10,000 SCSI is because it is so much newer and the data density is so much higher.

Size is another big concern. Video takes up tons of room so you will need a fairly big HD unless you burn data off to a cdr or dvd. SCSI rules but is expensive and IDE is not far behind. IDE DVD players are actually faster then SCSI because SCSI is always behind by a generation.

If you look at Tom's most recent article <A HREF="http://www.tomshardware.com/storage/01q4/011120/wd1200-04.html" target="_new">link</A> you will see that even the slowest drive mentioned is running about 15 Megabytes per second, 30 times faster then you need for an average mpeg2 stream. Check out this <A HREF="http://www.storage.ibm.com/hdd/ultra/ul73lzx.htm" target="_new">link</A> to see high end SCSI specs. Notice that the rate is between 376-697 Mbits/sec or 47 to 87 Mbytes/sec. Neither a SCSI nor an IDE drive can keep up with the speed of the interface. The SCSI in the link goes 87MB/s at its fastest but it is on a 320MB/s SCSI bus. This higher bus speed is only useful when running several drives on one bus. Lastly here is a <A HREF="http://www4.tomshardware.com/howto/01q3/010906/raid-06.html#data_transfer_diagrams" target="_new"> link </A> to what can be done with several raid setups.

Video is a recent passion and I have had both SCSI and IDE systems so I do know a little about what you are asking. I'm sure many know a lot more then I but believe me when I tell you to concentrate more money/research on a capture card then on a hd.

Remember if you ain't Muslim you ain't Shiite.