It sounds like a nice drive but lets stip off the marketing hype.

"Designed for power users, gamers and multi-media PC users who need the ultimate in performance"

The above is what's calling puffing in marketing. It doesn't really say anything or mean anything either. Its like new and improved on a box of laundy soap.

"data transfer rate up to 133MB/sec." More hype. the tip off is up to. It doesn't mean the drive will run at a sustained transfer rate of 133 MB a second and your don't need it to.

SATA is the newest inferface, mainly its just a thin cable instead of a ribbon cable.

"native Command Queuing (NCQ)" surprise... more empty puffing. What does it mean or do? They don't really say now do they.

The rest is pretty much the same. 7200 RPM is pretty standard. SATA interface is the new kid on the block all drive makers have it now. A 16MB cache buffer is twice the previous size, again Matrox isn't alone in offering 16MB cache. Does it really matter? No. Windows has built-in formatting. Is some little utility that formats and partitioning nice, sure, but you guessed it, more marketing hype.

Not saying its not a OK drive, I've got lots of Matrox, but then again I got lot of Segate, Western Digital and IBM. Hint: A hard drive is pretty much a hard drive. Buy a name brand and they are all pretty much the same feature wise.

What about the new MHX™Technology with dual-processor architecture to accelerate drive performance for multi-stream video applications.


ZION

Sounds like more of the same to me. The best thing is to have two or more physical hard drives not just a different drive partitions. Save one drive for rendering and/or capturing and printing to tape. Because rendering is time intensive and puts big demands on your CPU the speed of the hard drive really doesn't enter into the picture,not that you'd notice. I like to render to a different drive because more often than not its a removable drive so I can switch it in and out of other systems.

In other words a "faster" hard drive or some gobbledygook about dual-processor architecture built into the drive or larger buffers really doesn't amount to a hill of beans if you using it mainly for Vegas.

For rendering, the most time consuming part basically works like this: Vegas does its thing, a memory page buffer needs to fit up, then once it is, Windows will write that "page" from memory to some location on your hard drive. The bottle neck is the ability of the CPU to do what Vegas is asking it to do, ie applying the editing, apply filters, change frame size, rate, apply effects, transcode from one file format to another and so on. If your hard drive gets to write the memory page a few fractions of a second faster for each write, big deal. Nothing you'll notice real world. Want shorter render times? Get a faster CPU.

Well it looks like i'll be going with the WD Raptor drive for rendering and the Maxtor for storage.

Thanks for the input.


ZION