550D Footage playback stutter with fast cuts

Hey guys,
I'm having a lot of trouble getting PP to play my sequence smoothly. The footage is h.264 wrapped in a MOV container captured with my 550D (MagicLantern Firmware and 1.3x bitrate). The playback of an entire clip works perfectly fine. But when there are a lot of fast cuts, PP just chokes up and starts to stutter really bad.
I have an elitbook with 4GB of RAM, a Quadro FX 550M and a 7200 RPM hdd in this puppy so I'm not sure what the problem is. I read somewhere that I should reimport all my clips with an .mpg extension but that would be a disaster for my sequnce which is already 70% done...
Ideas?
EDIT:
I would like to note that mercury hardware playback doesn't make any difference

Single track AVCHD just playing the timeline.
What does this look like:
It looks like it's time for you to take some of your own tweaking advice there, Harm. Here's what I got.
1 stream...
4 streams
That's from a single drive. Yes, it peaked at around 50, probably to fill the cache, but then leveled off to the expected average of 5MB/s for 1 and 20 MB/s for 4.

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550D Footage playback stutter with fast cuts

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