[David Thornton]

Thank You Very Much Paul! I appreciate you going through my long winded post and answering so many of my questions. Just a couple more:

CS4 recommends Dual 2.8s If I get a quad at 2.4 this should cover me, yes? (I’m not sure if the math is as simple as 2.4×4 > 2.8×2)I’m looking at an AMD Phenom. I have always used AMD and it is a bit cheaper. Anyone have a good reason to switch to intel? (I am still scouting Motherboards, so that could also be a factor)

A gentleman at Frys said I will get the best performance if I set up my comp as follows:

RAID Drive Partitioned:
One partition holds Premier/Windows, etc, while the other holds raw footage I am using on the project I am currently editing.

Large drive for storing raw footage I am NOT currently working with.

Small drive for scratch disk.

This seems counter intuitive to me… I thought it was always best to have premier running on a separate physical drive than the raw footage. Does the RAID increase speed enough to warrant running everything from the same drive?

This was my original NEW setup plan:

SATA 1TB for holding ALL raw video, including what I am currently editing.

IDE Running Premier/Windows

IDE for a scratch disk.

(I cannot currently afford to replace all my old IDE Drives)

Now I am considering incorporating 2 160gb IDE drives into a RAID 1 or 0 (leaning towards 1 because they are older drives and I’m not editing on HD yet so space shouldn’t be a factor)

These drives are NOT identical, one is 150, the other is 160, probably different speed buffers… Can they still be put into a RAID array.

Will my performance be better if I run Premier from the RAID, use it as a dedicated raw footage drive, or can I partition it and do both?

Thanks again for the help!!

To George:
Thanks for the advice. Unfortunately I lost my 6.5 to the wind a while back. (I do miss its titler!) My financial aid has put me in a position to do some necessary upgrades. My school work last quarter pushed my system to its limits so I’m ready and excited to upgrade. Within my budget is a New MB and processer, 4 gigs ram, new video card, and hopefully a TB of storage. My goal is to get in under $600. Thanks to frys.com it is looking good… I’ll keep you posted