It's a pity you couldn't have made it to the Drive Workshop in London.
We looked at all the available drive technologies and their pros and cons.

Raptors have potential but they're not quite fast enough... They're certainly a big improvement on the standard drive, but don't give the performance of a 10,000 rpm SCSI drive.

Catalyst relies on how many transactions/second a drive can perform and SCSI drives tend to beat all other comers in this department. Even RAID arraying them doesn't improve the performance for our purposes - although this is helpful for uncompressed video sources. RAID arrays increase the possible data rate and overall storage capacity not the transactions/per second - i.e. how quick the drive can physically pull the movie off the drive.

A 150 Gb 10K SCSI drive is about 400 quid (probably the same in dollars) and a SCSI card is about 200 quid. Perfect. And you can run 1 Ph-Jpeg 50% 1080P movie, two 720P movies and 4 streams of DV PAL effortlessly. DV PAL is not quite as fast as NTSC to decode...

Hugh