Undetermined at this point - video is new medium for me so there will be much exploration. It didn't really play a part in the purchasing decision. It's more like... well... now that I've got this box... I've always wanted to do... <blank>.

The main purchasing driver was work. Sometimes I need to work with multiple VM's running simultaneously and they can be real resource hogs. Ultimately I just wanted to spend more time at home than in the office. This hardware helps me do that.

My justification... my last PC was purchased in 1996 - I ran it for a remarkable 12 years with not a single hardware failure. But running newer Photoshop on a Pentium II 450 with 256MB RAM was truly unbearable - I could go for coffee and it still be rendering when I got back. Heck, launching a browser took forever.

So - it was time and as far as I was concerned I'd paid my dues. This time around I wanted something that could think faster than me and that I would be happy with for a few years. I had also run out of patience dealing with Microsoft bugs/features and decided to take the plunge and buy a Mac. Quite frankly, I think it was the best decision I could've made - I am so happy with this machine - it's not perfect, but in comparison it's pretty good. I only wish I had one at work.

In any case, back to the scratch disk. Since I had lots of disks and disk space to work with I ended up implementing the configuration I outlined above. So far, it seems to be working very well. The Raid 0 really made a difference with the VM's too and the redundancy in my backups helps me sleep better at night.