I built my system recently and ran some test and discover something interesting: the playback performance relates to the file size rather then how intensive the compression is on the system. I was surprised to discover that uncompressed AVI (at 7GB) is crawling while HDV AVI (at 250MB) is flying.

SO my question is how to increase the performance of the system so it can play smoothly both 7GB files as well as 250MB???