When I first started editing HDV I realized that a RAID 0 array allowed me to capture footage without dropping any frames (previously, DV footage was adequately captured with a single drive). Now I have been using newer 7200 RPM drives with a 16MB or larger cache and they also capture HDV without dropping frames. I still use my RAID 0 array, but with the better single drives I don’t really need it.
I have not seen any great improvement one way or the other while editing or rendering. As far as external drives go, I have found that esata and IEEE1394 connections work very well while I have had ramdom glitches when using USB 2.0. I don’t know the reason for the poor USB performance, but it may be due to a packetizing delay, not average bit rate.
