[Build Help] I am a news photographer who needs to build a computer with some archival solutions for lots and lots of crap.

Hi!

First- thank you folks. I've been reading all of your guides from the Beginners Guide to Logical Increments and beyond and so many r/buildapc threads about your builds and your advice to others and successes and failures and it feels, frankly, exciting to learn new shit. This could become a dangerous place which to become addicted.

Second: I apologize for the long goddamn explanation. If tl;dr is starting to happen to you, the stuff in bold is the most pertinent

Here's my deal: I'm a full-time photojournalist at a mid-sized newspaper in the states. Lots of sports, lots of crime, lots of benefits, car wrecks, trials, fairs, parades, fires... lots and lots of photos. Every day. I shoot weddings pretty much every Saturday. So that's a 16gb card or two just for one day. The paper now wants us shooting video. So I do that shit too. 1080p 24fps clips out the wazoo that are then rendered from .mov to fucking huge-ass uncompressed .avi files for editing, then the edited renders, etc., etc.,. etc.,...

So you see where this is going.

Add to all that, I'm one of those assholes who takes 30 shots to get one shot (not allowed to manipulate photos AT ALL so everything has to be bracketed like crazy) and I'm afraid to delete ANYTHING because I always come up with insane scenarios in my head where one particular photo might have for just one frame a crystal clear image of a person in the background who has never been photographed and they need to find him because the bomb is about to go off or whatever and holy shit I just deleted that photo permanently from the universe.

It's a stupid quirk, but I'm willing to pay for it if I have to.

So here's what I need:

1. A fast goddamn computer.

Mine is just not cutting it anymore. The renders from Quicktime to unpackage the .mov files for Avid take more time than it does to edit. I have 12 hour days on the road and I come home to edit a video file and FTP the images and I have to sit there like a jackass because my computer is slow. Sometimes I don't get to go to bed at all because of this and I suffer for it the next day.

2. A fast goddamn graphics card

For video, I know and love Avid Media Composer. It operates quickly enough if I drag down the preview resolution but now that we're working with HD, especially, I'd like the luxury of previewing edits at a much higher resolution, preferably on a second screen, so I don't miss some little kid flipping me off who is standing behind the person I'm shooting. THIS HAPPENED ONCE.

3. Some better goddamn storage solutions

I've read some of your recommendations in other threads for SSD for the OS and programs and then the F3's or Caviar Blacks for storage. Sounds groovy. Let me put it bluntly, though: I have Terabytes of bullshit that I can not, by logic or by compulsion, delete. You know those WD External drives you see for $40 at WalMart? I got a shitload of those things filled up. And they're going to fail. At least a few are. A couple already have. I haven't really "backed up" anything, I just move it all from my internal harddrive to an external, wait for it to fill up, then buy another one. With video now, this is happening at a much faster pace than I am comfortable and I do not trust these external drives. Also they are slow and cheap.

So! An external tower with bays of hot-swap drives? With a RAID profile maybe? How does one organize such a thing with so many drives? How should they be stored once full? If I am set up for say, RAID 5, and a drive decides to commit suicide, is the process of replacing that particular drive in the set difficult? Or dangerous to the data? How slow would such a thing perform?

Other than perhaps an internal card-reader I could put in one of the external bays and a DVD-RW (fuck, might as well go with a BluRay-RW at this point, this is already going to set me back to a "YOU CAN'T AFFORD BURGER KING, ASSHOLE!" type diet for more than a few months, those three things are pretty much the essentials.

There might be solutions I haven't thought of or don't know about.

I need a machine that can run all of Adobe Creative Suite Master Collection 5 and Avid Media Composer 5, (usually I'm running Firefox, Quicktime Pro, Bridge CS5, Avid Media Composer and Photoshop CS5 simultaneously while eating a sandwich) and can store all of my bullshit.

Have you ever put a parts-list together for a crazy person?

You can today.

Help me.