This particular machine is a 2.4GHz Core2 Duo with 2GB RAM running XP Pro SP3. Near the end of its life as my primary station - an i7 roughly per the build Jeff Harper has described is next.

The Intensity Pro comes with drive speed test software, here are my results:
2-drive SATA Raid 0 - 73.3MB/s read, 76.7MB/s write.
Per their report, this will get me 18/19fps for 1080 4:2:2 8bit, 41/43fps for 720p, 109/114 for SD.

For 10-bit 4:2:2 - 13/14 at 1080, 31/32 at 720.

This raid is hardware managed via a dedicated mobo controller, not windows managed.

Well now. That's odd. I just ran a speed test on a partition of my system drive, non-raid, and got better results than the raid drive, at 94.4MB/s read, 95.9MB/s write. That still only gets me 23/24fps for 1080, but is an indication that something's wrong with my raid setup - it ought to give me something like 150MB/s or more.

Oops. Looks like I have some 'splaining to do... these Raid0 results don't count. Perhaps a properly configured and optimized 2-drive SATA Raid 0 is going to be fast enough for the BMD codecs at 1080.

Hi Seth.
It sounds like you've got a lot more knowledge and experience than I do. Please let me know what you find out about your RAID 0 setup.
Other users have said that 2.4 GHz is marginal, and that 2.6 GHz is better...but it sounds like you have more of a handle on this particular problem than I do, at the moment.
I will be interested to know how it works out.
Norman

The Intensity can capture either uncompressed or using its Motion JPEG codec. Capturing 1920x1080 uncompressed at 59.94 fields per second requires a data rate of about 120 megabytes per second. This is too much for a single high-end hard drive. The Intensity's MJPEG codec requires about 13 megabytes per second at 1080i-59.94 and virtually any hard drive can do this without breaking a sweat.

John, thanks for that clarification. I hadn't really gotten to wringing out the capture side, and, due to unfamiliarity, was mislead by the disk speed test app.

Confirming what John said, the disk speed test app that comes with the IP has uncompressed capture benchmarks built into it. It also gives you raw data, but you gotta' know how to interpret it!

I'm now doing some test captures using the BMD MJPEG codec, and though I'm just at my desk, with no examples of smooth motion to shoot, it appears to be capturing just fine.

Regarding CPU (Core2 Duo at 2.4GHz)... this is a pretty stripped down editing machine, there's nothing extra running in the background. I'm doing 1080-60i running about 88% processor load, peaks up to about 93%. Short tests, lots of camera motion.

No time to get into the Raid 0 configuration right now, but I'm hopeful of getting that speed up significantly.