Originally Posted by notjoe

Lacies's are basically a striped array of drives in a housing and one single drive.

rich219content is 1000% correct.

Fact is that very few apps have SMP support and thus wont hit the 2nd processor, ever. If you're planning on using the machine while it is encoding then you might want to consider the multi-cpu thing.

besides getting the fastest FSB MOBO/RAM you can find you'll want sata drives as they're the best bang for the buck.

You'll also notice a huge difference in encoding speed by reading the video from one drive and writing it to a different drive. You basically want to reduce all the bottlenecks you'll encounter.