I currently have the 2 15K sas drives in a raid 0 config. I am thinking of using the enhance-tech quadrapak I saw on the site to install 4 2.5in 10k sas drives instead. I want the best perfmormance possible. I do basic editing of movies at home (just starting) and play games although nothing that advanced. I am mostly impatient and trying to improve on the times when rending the clips from dv to mpeg2 for storage or converting frapsed video to wmv and things like that.

I am currently running a dual woodcrest 3Ghz with 8GB Ram and the 2 15k sas drives on Vista x64. I was doing some work over the weeked and say that my cpu never really maxed out but I thought it should be able to handle it faster so I am thinking maybe it is my hard drives. I am using Premiere elements (latest Version).

I have all the data backed up so i am not worried about that part of it.

Thanks for any input.

4x 10K works best in your particular instance.

Editing large video files requires more bandwidth than quick access times, which you can only achieve by having more drives to pull the data from.


If you were running a database or something dealing with lots of small files and high IO operation then the 15K would make more sense.

Thanks for the tip. I had one other question. Would the controller make much of a difference? This is a precision 490 workstation using the Perc 5i raid controller. Would moving to a 256MB caching controller by adaptec help at all or just an overkill?

Thanks in advance.

In my opinion, the percs suck. You can look around the forum for some examples to back this up.

In general from viewing comparisons on this forum an Adaptec, LSI, 3Ware, Areca, etc... controller generally slaps the Perc around like a redheaded step-child.

4x10k. I could use some more 15k SAS drives. You interested in selling?

Actually I think I am going to keep both the 2 15k ones and the 4 10k ones. I may make the primary HD be the 4 10k ones and then just setup to capture any video to the 2 15 ones. Then during the converting process it will read off the 2 drives and write to the 4. I am hoping that will give me the best perf I can get.

15k SAS OS Drive
15k SAS Paging File
+ 10k SAS (x4) RAID 0 Application Drives
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Kick @ss