Harm Millaard wrote: Good transfer rates. Keep in mind that SATA is a half duplex connection, so effective R/W rates on a single disk can easily be halved from what the marketeers claim.

You also have to take the combined simultaneous internal throughput of a specific drive into consideration. Different model drives with otherwise identical physical transfer rates may deliver wildly differing internal transfer rates (as reflected in the file-copy tests from one folder to another folder on the exact same physical drive). Two drives may have similar maximum and minimum sequential transfer rates (185 MB/s maximum and 80 MB/s minimum), but one can transfer internally at up to 90 MB/s while the other might struggle at only 30 MB/s internal throughput.

In addition, you are correct in assuming that the maximum physical transfer rate also effectively gets halved with a half-duplex connection. But then, as stated in the above paragraph, there is the maximum internal transfer rate of a specific disk (which is almost always lower than the maximum sequential transfer rate of that same disk) to deal with. This slows down the performance of PCs that use a single disk for absolutely everything including the OS even further than is implied by the mere theoretical half-duplex performance drop.

As for SAS, sure, the interface may allow simultaneous reads and writes. But then, you'd still run into the single disk's internal throughput limitations.

Now I can see how a single 5400rpm laptop hard drive can be woefully inadequate for video editing, especially when used as the sole disk for absolutely everything and for HD content: While many such drives can deliver 90 MB/s to or from the disk to the disk's buffer memory, their internal transfer rate (when copying large files from folder to folder within the exact same disk) can be significantly lower than 10 MB/s.

For one, it does not have the monitor resolution required, which requires at least 900 vertical resolution. It does not have two physical different SATA 7200 RPM drives.

If you want to work in the blind, without seeing the complete user interface and guessing at the option you choose on a system slower than molasses in winter, go ahead, but the people at PC WORLD do not know what they are talking about. They are from another world.