Just wandering if you setup your HDD in a RAID-1 configuration for incresed datarate to edit HD content. Or how do you connect an external disk, USB, Firewire or SATA. I have used an usb connection to edit sd and everything is smooth on the timeline.

I connect to external hard drives via FireWire400 or 800, depending on which edit computer I'm using (both Macs running FCP6 and FCP7 respectively) and I pull HDV and ProRes material off just fine. Uncompressed HD would be another story entirely...

I use RAID 0 with eSATA for the fastest read/write speeds. Firewire doesn't provide the speed I need for my higher end broadcast projects but is fine for my simpler projects.

My mac pro has three 1tb sata drives in a raid 0 array and I work on pro res HQ from P2 AVC Intra 100 as my high end edit suite.

I also have a g-tech 1tb raid 0 firewire 800 drive and that is OK for pro res LT with the macbook pro but I have just done a whole indie drama which was shot AVC Intra 50 and loaded as pro res LT on a single lacie rugged firewire 800 5400 drive and it all went rather well on FCP 7, I had to render any effects or transitions but it played back OK and I was quite surprised.

I have a PC running Win7 & Premiere CS5.5. Ipull from my SDHC cards (550D & Sony AX-2000) to a 2x1TB Raid 0 drive for editing (SATA interface). This is rather easy, fast and smooth. For security, I backup projects to a network drive, a DroboFS with 3.5TB of storage.

For mobile editing, I'm using an external 500GB G-Raid Mini with eSATA connection to a PC running CS5.5. I haven't yet encountered any hiccups in the process, but then, most projects edited on this setup are necessarily smaller/shorter.

FYI, monitoring on either system is through a Matrox MXO2 Mini. Nice and simple.