I am getting a laptop for editing with avid xpress pro i'm a begginer wanting to become an expert but dont want to have to ubgrade system in a long time and i have few options for hard drive:
1x 100GB (7200) SATA (within budget )
2x 60GB (7200) ATA with RAID0 (a lot more £$£$ )
1x 120GB (5400) ATA ( )
2X 80GB (5400) ATA ( )
What should i get :

what about a PATA drive never herd of thatone before

Respectfully, but with drives that small you WILL have to upgrade sooner than you think.

At normal SD resolutions. One hour of raw footage equates to about 12Gb. This goes up to 40-50Gb for high def.

You'll soon get through 100 Gb of HDD

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PATA = Parellel ATA. Your bog standard IDE interface.

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I suggest leaving the internal drive for non vidoe stuff and adding an external firewire drive for video storage.

Nice firewire drive cases can be had for less than 20 quid and then you add a 3.5 inch drive, these are much better value per gig than lap top drives.

When you need another drive just another enclosure and chain them together.

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Tanks for sugestions.
What if i get the 100GB (7200) ATA itself and use it for aplications and video storage while i get an external one?
what if i get 80gb (7200) for video and 60(5400) for the rest?
or i will just simply not do without a bigger external drive?

If this is a one off project then you'll get away with it, but as I said before, if editing video is going to be any kind of a hobby (or more) then 80Gb or a 100Gb disk drive is simply not going to last very long at all.

Just me 2p.

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I'm not young enough to know everything!

Thanks!
i have decided to buy a power mac and thanks to your suggestions i will also get an external drive.
What brand and kind of drive?
i have also heard that with drives of more than 200gb Avid would present problems. is it necesary to partition it?

Be carefull buying a MAC laptop. As you know Apple is transitioning to Intel chips and if you need to update later you might need to re-purchase your software.

...that is for both laptops and desktops....soon they'll be based on Intel CPUs.