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Ripping Mini-DV to hard dive and keeping it in the DV codec is best for future editing, though this will eat up space faster than Oprah eats cake. DV compression is around 5:1, so about every second is 3.6MB of space (or about 25mbps), so a minute of DV video will be around 216mb per minute. This can add up pretty fast. While clearly better on space than uncompressed rgb, it is still going to eat up your space pretty fast.
On all my vids, after I positive (yeah, that?s rare LOL) that I am done with final product and send it off, I will compress the video one last time into mpeg-2 for future archival purposes/reference vids. This saves a shitload of space so you can fit a lot more vids per hard drive than you can with DV. Mpeg-2 is usually a lot harder to deal with though, especially if you ever have to write anything back to the tape, so until you have your finished product I would not recommend converting to Mpeg-2.
As bobbyjuly said though, you can get mini dv tapes (bulk) for under 2 bucks a pop so it may make more sense in your case to just keep the tapes and invest in a few storage boxes for them. Mini-DV tapes seem to last a long time, especially when compared to VHS tapes, so as long as you store them properly at room temp. in low humidity, I would trust a mini-dv tape holding the original video data than most hard drive setups.
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