Thanks Richard - as usual you make a lot of calm sense and supplied good reference info and material.

KentuckyRanger: Just to further demonstrate that SSDs are not yet the golden goose, in S14 (and also AS1.1), the machine in my profile chuggs along at 134f/s doing the same (PAL) DV-avi to mpeg-2 conversion Richard mentioned while using only lowly Samsung 5400 drives. Now if fitting SSDs iso the magnetic disks can get me a 50% improvement on that I would say it could be worth considering upgrading, but as it stands currently, during many many many attempts and benchmarks with both SSDs and striped Raptor raid get-ups, I could manage around 140f/s with those expensive alternatives in the same machine in my profile......................... and that basically echoes exactly the performance figures Richard quoted before. If you can post a video of the screen-capture of the render process of Richard's experiment showing your SSDs are resulting in 550f/s+ render speed I will gladly eat my hat and swap to SSDs today.