[Charles Stevens]

Thanks for your insights Dave – definately helpful. I’m to a point where I’m almost thinking of scratching the whole idea of an SSD for the reason that I mentioned earlier – about filling up all the blocks (my my internet research on this). I’m probably going to get either the momentus XT or WD Black 7200. The article I had put up actually did test the momentus XT – but this was not evident until page 6 and onwards on their graphs of benchmark comparisons where they tested both the older momentus and the newer momentus xt (I’m assuming XT here denotes only the hybrid drive). Not trying to argue or anything – either way both the WD black and momentus XT are fairly close so in real world experiences, probably not noticable differences by much.

https://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/notebook-hdd-750gb,2832-6.html

Charles

[Charles Stevens]

Good articles Dave. I liked the Anandtech article. I read an article recently comparing the top 7200rpm drives including the Momentus XT and it seemed to give the edge to WD Scorpio Black 7200 esp on PC Vantage. Even power requirements seemed to be opposite to the article you quoted from notebookreview. Argh…so frustrating when you see so much conflicting info. Systems the drives were tested on were a bit different – mostly in the processor.

https://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/notebook-hdd-750gb,2832.html

[Charles Stevens]

thanks for the replies. Sounds like there’s definitely a speed advantage to separating read and write operations physically through drives.

@Dave:

How much faster would set up #3 be than set up #1 if I separated read and writes?  Also what happens behind the scenes with reading and writing when I’m editing but not rendering or exporting? I’m assuming minimal writing and mostly reading. 

Re: SSD drives, glad to hear they have 5 year life. Warning – long question. If I was constantly copying source files on the drive and deleting then once I’m done with a project, even if the source files were relatively much smaller than the drive and I always had a bunch of free space on the drive, the way SSS writes writes data, would  I still quickly fill up the free blocks on the drive and cause it then to slow down in performance?

@Nigel:
Thanks for the tip. Since I would have my source media on the read drive and would already have a backup for that. I’ll skip raid 1 and would either do Raid 0 or just a single HD (or even an SSD).

I’m curious about your system b/c I was considering a i7-970. I was told that w 12GB RAM (which was max on that system i could get) it would be slower than i7-2720QM with 16GB RAM for video editing all other things being equal. Any thoughts?

Here are the only benchmarks I could find. 
https://www.primatelabs.ca/geekbench/pc-benchmarks/

https://www.cpubenchmark.net/cpu_lookup.php?cpu=Intel+Core+i7-2630QM+%40+2.00GHz

Thanks.

Charles