Having trouble finding some current wisdom on how much HDD speed I really need for editing modest HD video projects in CS5. Old school says you need (at the very least) dual 7200 rpm drives in raid... but is that still true? Modern drives are so much faster than even a few years ago.

I put together a pretty quiet (not silent) i7-870 system with great help from folks here. Runs fast and cool. Already have a small OS drive. So I need maybe 1TB or so for video files and other storage. (There's room for suspending a drive or two in my case and my mobo has built-in RAID. Plus firewire, USB 3.0 and eSata.)

Not running a production house or compositing massive layers of effects --- but don't want video drive to be a bottleneck.
So here are my dumb questions about the technology in current 1tb drives:

>> Does lots of cache trump the need for high RPMs? If so, 32mb? 64mb?
>> If so, could I edit video with a single WD Caviar Green or Samsung F2 Ecogreen?
>> Are current 1tb 7200 drives now almost as quiet?
>> Should I consider using external drives? Etc...

Would appreciate any real-world advice. Thanks in advance!




System: Intel i7 870 / 8gb Ram / Hyper 212 Plus / Cooler Master Elite 341 / Scythe S-Flex Fans
GIGABYTE GA-H57M-USB3 / GeForce GT 240 / Win7 64

1. Only if using small frequently used files. Cache will be mostly useless in sequential disk accesses, which video editing will be.
2. You can edit video with whatever you want, but the slower the disk the slower the process.
3. Some 7,200rpm drives are rather quiet compared to older drives, but not as quiet as 5400rpm drives or many 2.5" drives.
4. Never, unless you will be taking your finished product somewhere...

HDDs have not progressed at the same rate as the rest of the PC's components with regards to transfer speed, so it will usually be the bottleneck in most systems. Using a couple HDDs in RAID0 would offer good performance improvement, but no redundancy.

People are doing video editing on laptops these days.

I highly doubt any modern 3.5" drive will bottleneck video editing performance.