External storage (Raid 0/1) video editing

Hi
I have a macbook pro with about 400GB (and growing) of home made videos of my kids (which are also growing).
I currently backup my mac (including videos) to an external HD using Time Machine.
I want to get these movies off my MBP HD but still want redundancy and still want easy access to videos for editing.
I currently use iMovie but am considering moving to Final Cut.
My proposed solutions are:
NOTE: Hard Drives in all solutions will be 7200RPM.
A. Get a Raid 1 HD (Probably 4TB which will give me 2TB worth of videos). Will performance be good enough?
B. Get a Raid 0 HD (2TB) - Do I need this for the performance or will SOlution C suffice?
C. Get a std HD (2TB).
From what I read, Both FCP and iMovie will work *well* (i.e. not just ok) with an external drive (assuming you get one with reasonable performance).
Can someone confirn that?
In all the above solutions (including solution A -since both drives are still in the same enclosure), I will need to back up the drive.
Is there anyway to make Time Machine do the job?If not, I will probably use Carbon Copy Cloner unless someone knows a better program.
Finally, any suggestions for the drives? G-Technology seems to get a lot of attention...especially for their Raid drives. I am thinking about that one.
Thanks in advance for your response(s)

  A single HD (soln C) will work fine  IF your video isn't highly layered and/or doesn't use multicam, etc etc.  For a "typical" small video there is no need for any RAID but if things get complex enough you may need some form of RAID and if you start playing with 2k or 4k and that kind of thing then you need fast everything. Sadly there are no "roll your own" enclosures with Thunderbolt yet but you could start with a good HD like a WD Black drive if you do reasonably simple stuff like most folks and then, if you find it wanting in the future you can always incorporate it into a RAID. I always say "buy drives in pairs because every drive needs a backup..."

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