I have a different philosophy than Dale about hard drives.

I don't believe in mirroring for artistic work, given a limited budget. Nor do I believe in huge RAID-0 arrays for the working directory.

Instead, I believe in steady, methodical, frequent backup.

I purchase the highest quality, fast HD for my working array, very reliable; but I assume it will crash and burn at any second!

I use the smaller Raptors. When I built my last system I bought two 35-Gig, so with RAID-0 that made 70Gig working directory. On this I put Poser, Runtime Folder and current work files (.pz3).

I have another small drive on which I have only the operating system and the page file.

In my opinion, this creates the fastest access while posing and rendering. 

Since the working volume is 'small' and can crash at any second, I constantly backup my Runtime&Work folders to several large external HDs, and again to DVD-data disks for storage offsite. My most precisous pz3 I upload to my webserver for another layer of backup.

I suppose now a "small" array would be two 74-gig Raptors, yielding a working directory of 148Gig. I don't think you can even obtain the 35GIG anymore!

http://www.techbargains.com/news_displayItem.cfm/100373?rss=1
NOTE: $129 for a 74 Gig drive might seem expensive to some, but these raptors are very reliable, very fast and very good.

NOTE: The danger of a large working directory is that one gets lulled into thinking this is a "storage" directory, since it is so "big." That is dangerous thinking.

::::: Opera :::::

P.S. My 35x2 Raptor RAID-0 array has never failed, never faulted in two years of steady, heavy use.