[Konstantin Detinenko]

Dear Dave,

My friend has one of the latest i7 cpu with raid 0 hdd configuration and I was able to edit hd video streams from 3 cameras in multicamera mode in real time with sony vegas pro 10c, but I found it annoying that it would lag each time new event starts, especially those with transition applied on. The only way around it was building a RAM previews.

You made me realize hard drive bottleneck as I was experiencing not fully loaded cpu when rendering too, but I am more interested in flawless editing rather than quick rendering.

I made some research on seek time, as I conducted that lag happens because of the same reason you spoke in this thread, and the best solutions I came with were:

Solid State Drive in raid
https://www.ebuyer.com/product/258813
Cons
Quick throughput 740 MB/s and 0.1ms access time.
Pros
I have doubts about SSD handling multiple streams, so I searched about it and found that MLC (Multi Level Cell) is bad with it, while SLC is handling it pretty well. I am not sure about this SSD raid being MLC or SLC though.

Several regular hard drives in Raid 1 configuration.
Cons
It was hard to research this, but on some sites it is said that proper Raid controllers in Raid 1 configuration distributes files being read to different hard drives, thus freeing individual hard drives from seeking and putting them to linear reading. It should make it precache, read more efficiently and wear less the mechanical parts I believe.
Pros
It was hard to find any information on advantage of Raid 1 in access time because of everyone hyping over Raid 0 with its double speed and all, so I could not find how to discern controllers which can distribute tasks between drives and which cannot.

Spreding files accross hard drives as you mentioned.
Cons
Good idea as being the simpliest one. And it leaves all the space on the drive intact.
Pros
1st: I wouldn’t like to do workarounds all the time, instead I prefer to find 1 workaround which will make rest of the time as little work as possible. 2nd: It has limitations in how you can edit things. For example it is easy to separate footage from different cameras, but when there will be cuts and transitions between the same camera footage, so if Raid 1 solution would work, it would be better alternative. And its lack of space comes around with its reliability.

I was reading this forum quite a lot of times and people here seem pretty helpful. I tried to do as much on my own so I would contribute too in helping people get the best results out of their machines.
Thank you! looking forward for any thoughts.
Any information on behavior of raid controllers in raid 1 configuration will be greatly appreciated!