Well 3 drives would be a dream really. Luckily my new board has 8 SATA-II ports so i wouldn't need any external drives or a raid card, so it would be a lot cheaper. I've been looking at some drives and 500gb internal SATA-II are now only around the £70 mark and then all i would need to get is a good quality removable drive bay ( not over keen on any external solution due to bad experiences in the past with usb drives), which the bay would only be about £40 so i need to get about £250 in total. Having 3 drives would open up a new world (especially the third for backup alone). doing the fx for the death star battle takes up an amazing amount of space using the lagaryth codec. One shot alone can take up over 6gb of space before rendering. So i think i am going to go with the suggestions of 3 drives, but that would probably make me sound very greedy. And once this edit is finished i can get straight onto ESB & ROTJ

once again many thanks for all your support