That's the other thing with the 7200rpm 100gb and other fast-spinning drives. Seek times are very important when running striped data sets where data is interleaved between the two drives. The 100gb 7200rpm is still the king of seek times (although the 160GB 5400 is nipping at its heels), but it's enough better that it can really shine in these striped RAID configurations.

The reason why the 160 beats or performs almost as good in every test review on the internet is because it is denser. To put it simply, the computer doesn't have to go as far to get the same information because more is occupying the same space.

Here's an analogy: imagine you used to drive 14miles at 40mph to the store. Now a new store opened up 7 miles away from you and you just need to drive 40mph to get to it. AND laws have changed and you can now drive at 70mph to the store 14miles away.

Which is the fastest route?

Now remember I'm in canada so if that miles and mph stuff is off don't blame me but that should give you the general idea of how it all works. :)

True, but I have had performance problems capturing HDV to AIC - approximately 4x DV bandwidth. I was willing to trade off disk space for smoother, quicker editing with less narcoleptic 'spinning beachball of death' moments on my 1.33 GHz G4 PowerBook, but even a FW800 LaCie couldn't quite keep up - probably because attaching the Z1 to a PowerBook's 400FW bus drags everything down to 400*, and overworks the bus - what with ingest and writing to hard disk at the same time.

One day I'll get around to testing AIC ingest on my G-RAID.

* IIRC, the FW400 and FW800 ports are on the same bus - if a FW400 device is connected, the FW800 port becomes throttled to the same speed. Apple did not advocate having camcorder and capture disk on the same FW bus for some time (I think it was acknowledged from 4.5 onwards). The canonical way was to use a FW PCMCIA card for ingest, and the FW800 port for capture scratch.

OTOH, I see there's an eSATA card for the MacBook Pros allowing a cheap SATA 250GB drive (for less than an an equivalent LaCie triple) get upto 5x the performance of a FW800 drive.

I still going to wait for leopard to be finalized before I seriously think about a new machine.

A firewire PC card would probably help with that. I have never edited HDV on my 1ghz powerbook, but have done a lot of DV editing. I picked up a FW 400 PC card at Best Buy for about $20. This gave me two FW busses. You can definitely see a significant speed increase if you plug a firewire drive into each bus and copy some big files.

The FW 400 PC card could be used for your camcorder and that would free up the builtin FW 800 port for your disk.

The next MacBook Pro should have a hard drive like this.
http://www.extremetech.com/article2/...2050534,00.asp

Seeing how my new C2D Macbook Pro has the Hitachi 160GB drive in it, I'm sure Apple will be offering these once they become available in sufficeint quantity. They will almost certainly be config options with the next major revision of the Macbook Pro, which should happen July/August, if Apple continues to hold to their current update schedules.

17" Mac BookPro to arrive ...
 

on Nov. 14. I should have it up and running soon after it arrives. Lots of software to buy (ugghhh).