bigbear: The PIC won't be any good for video processing. They are good performers for their class, but for video I'd probably go with something specially designed for handling video. PICs are great for doing a variety of jobs (think....microconroller
).
As far as wiring and everything goes, it's pretty simple. You can get simple proto boards and sockets for the chips and hook stuff up. You may need a little soldering for the chips, but wiring can usually just be done using regular wires for protoboards. If you really want something compact you could always go and do your own traces with a kit, that's handy if you want to set up your own form factor and have no wires protruding.
On hard drives.....ok so here's the deal. IBM used to be the shizniz until they shifted manufacturing to I believe Hungary. They had so many problems it became unprofitable (not to mention class-action lawsuit) and sold the HD business.
WD used to use IBM components, that's why they "tried to be like IBM." It was basically a rebadged IBM drive. Not anymore, not sure if they're back to manufacturing their own or not.
WD hard drives only have a 1 year warranty now. Unless of coure you go SCSI, or maybe SATA. But the Caviar line is 1 year warranty. They can be acquired very cheap, but also have a bad rep for failure.....then again, I just bought an 80 GB WD Caviar.
Seagate and Maxtors are supposed to be quieter than the WD's. Not sure how they are on reliability.
If you get a 7200 rpm or above drive, invest in some cooling for it. A HD bay cooler works very well. It'll definitely drown out any noise the HD makes.
3 years for a HD is nothing. The fact that people even believe that shows that they've been brainwashed by crappy manufacturing and quality control standards for the last few years. A HD ought to easily last you 5-7 years under normal use. If you leave your system on 24/7 and never powerdown the hard drives and do lots of data processing on them, perhaps 3 years is a more appropriate lifetime....however for most normal computer users 3 years is pretty short. The fact that drives are commonly dying within anywhere from 1 day (IBM) to 1 year (anybody) is pretty shoddy in my opinion.
Raid is definitely an idea worth considering.
b