The chaps over at PC Perspective have posted a high end storage comparison today that pits a pair of SSDs against Quad Velociraptors. Who wins?

As it turns out, both configurations performed very well under these criteria and there is little doubt that the Areca 1230 card is responsible for some of that leveling between the SSDs and traditional hard drives. The raw performance edge still obviously goes to the pair of SiliconEdge SSDs though I was impressed at how close the Velociraptors were able to get. Obviously if you are worried about capacity and price more than the top speed result here, I think the Western Digital Velociraptors are easily the best pick.

However, for our specific application use, it turns out the lower access times the SSDs provide outweigh the benefits of the capacity boost. Our primary use case is with Adobe Premiere Pro CS5 and editing raw HD footage out of the Canon 7D camera that can drop in at over 20 GB of video per project. While both of our test configurations seemed to handle the importing and exporting process on about the same level, when it comes to "scrubbing" along the time line of files while searching for specific locations in a 4GB file, reading the data at 0.2 ms as opposed to 7.1 ms is noticeable. Rather than reading those large files all at once (where both configurations would be on par with each other) we were asking the system to very quickly jump in and out of specific locations in those files, something the SSDs have the advantage in.