Hi

. . . . The 'theory' behind this is that the drive containing the program is not being taxed too much by performing "double-duty" of reading & processing the content during the burn/finalizing tasks.

Is there any truth to this? . . . .

The following scanarios exist depending on the number of hard drives in the computer:

1.   Single hard drive

This is the slowest of the possible scenarios because you have the following reading and writing to the drive:

Windows for its swap file with both read and write activity

Program read and writing data to the drive eg when rendering, creating proxies etc.

These two activities clash and the changing from read to write and vice versa introduces small delays which slows down data transfer rates

2.    Two internal hard drives

Here you store the data on second drive and the program set to use folders on the second drive as well

Windows contnues to use the first (system) drive for  its swap file with both read and write activity

The program uses the second drive for both read and write

Result is a small increase in data transfer rate due to Windows and the program not waiting for disc access and significantly reduces the amount of thrashing a single drive gets thus prolonging the hard drive life.

3.  Three internal hard drives

As for 2 except all write date when rendering is directed to the third hard drive.

This in theory results in the fastest system as during rendering the data is read from one drive and written to another ie both drives tend to spend the majority of their time in one mode.

I can only say for my system I get the maximum render rate using 3 above, however the diffrence is small.  The small difference between 2 and 3 disc system gives rise to the question of whether it is worth spending the money to have a three drive system - the only reason I have is result of experimenting with SSD drives to see if

     a)    they were worth the extra cost

and

     b)    gave any significant advantages.

In my case the answer to both was no - the main limiting factors being cost, storage capacity and, with existing SATA 6 drives, the speed increase was not significant enough.

IMHO SSD's do not have the capacity of hard drives for video editting and in my case the speed increase using SSD for the OS or data drive was not significant enough to consider investing in SSD.

In your case the best upgrade I would advise is adding a second hard drive of 1 - 2 TB capacity and increasing your RAM to 16GB  if your motherboard has the necessary spare slots - the latter does assume your Windows is 64 bit.

If you have the 32 bit version of Windows then there is no point in increasing the RAM and the RAM you do have is not being fully utilised.

HTH

John EB