Video Editing Previews? FRAPS? What hard drive should I get?

RAID 0 would definately improve write performace, but you would have to carefully wiegh the pros/cons. There shouldn't be any reason why you can't do the stuff you are talking about without going to a RAID 0 solution (IMHO). Unless of course the issue is actually the CPU/Memory or maybe video card. Actualy I'm not sure how your hard drive would be the culprit, maybe you can explain why to me?

I currently have Seagate drives and they are ok, I would likely buy a Samsung Spinpoint if I were shopping right now. Or maybe a WD Black. however, I buy my stuff from http://ncix.com/products/index.php?minorcatid=109

Great Canadian company and I have never had a problem with them and the pricing is pretty good, but you have to factor shipping into it.

Whats the rest of the system? I currently use Nero 7 to do my video transcoding and the preview window for mine runs just fine. Converting a ~3hr .avi file to DVD takes just over an hour to convert and burn at 4x. (E6600 at stock with 4GBs of ram.) I have three different Seagate 7200.10 drives in my system of various sizes.

As for fraps, the issue there as I understand it is that if you are recording video to the same drive as your game is being played on your make your drive try to do too much and it won't have enough speed to do to both. (You can have this problem with your video editing as well.) The solution is to have a second drive. Your game drive has its read/write heads available to load new levels, etc, and your FRAPS drive has its free to record the game.

The need to do this isn't required for some games. I play TF2. I load the level, and its done. There is no more loading until the map is finished. As long as I don't record during the load phase there is no reason to have a second drive. And considering there is nothing going on during the load phase there is no reason to record. Other games might load during game play so this isn't a 100% truth. Check the game your playing for loads during game play.

Your selection of the seagate drive is good although I'll recommend the 7200.12 version.. Video getting choppy depends on software primarily rather than hard drive.. I use AVS for video conversion and it gives very good results.. I BTW have a single 5 year old 250 GB Hitachi hard drive..

Lets see. I have
AMD Phenom II X4 945 Processor @ 3.00GHz
4gigs of RAM.
Windows 7 64 Ultimate
ATi Radeon HD 4870
600W PSU
16mb 500gb 7200rpm Samsung Hard drive


thanks for the input so far. would it be wiser then, to add some ram onto it? or go for this? (btw thanks for the link. I'm Canadian, so no shipping fee! woot!
http://ncix.com/products/index.php?sku=49591#CustomerRe... I'm on a 150$ ish budget.

If you are interested in the WD Green for purely storage purposes then sure, go for it.. Your system otherwise looks complete otherwise and you may like to save the bucks.. Adding another 4 GB of RAM will not aid in decreasing conversion timings..