Powerful System With Bottleneck: PPro CS6 Preview Very Slow.

Question

Hello there!
I'm a YouTube MotoVlogger filming with 3 GoPro cameras in 1080p, which I stack up in Premiere CS6 to get different angles. I also sometimes make use of a green-screen for other fun things and will export this as an uncompressed TGA-sequence from After Effects, with alpha of course.
I've been having really bad problems trying to preview my project in Premiere CS6, and despite my system being fairly-powerful, I know there's a major bottleneck somewhere—probably with my HD setup with respect to editing. I basically can't preview a TGA sequence (which is repeated 3 times at different scales) without rendering first.
Initially, I suspected my video card since it was a GTX550Ti and wasn't fully-supported, but only has 192 CUDA cores. I went and got a GTX 680 with 1536 CUDA cores but noticed no real improvement. I am also not getting any kind of yellow pre-render indicator in Premiere. It's just all red and doesn't preview well at all.
My system specs:
Dual XEON Hexacore, 24-cores total
48GB RAM DDR3
SSD Boot drive (OS)
Main Drive: Seagate Barracuda ST31000524AS 1TB 7200 RPM 32MB Cache SATA 6.0Gb/s 3.5" Internal Hard Drive -Bare Drive (Premiere installed here).
3TB Backup drive (USB 3)
NVIDIA GTX 680 Video
Of course, had I known about this RAID stuff or that I would get heavy into editing, I would have gotten the system built with RAID 0, but I don't have it and I have a lot of stuff installed, from 3D Graphics to Audio software, vinyl cutting, etc.
So, am I correct in my guess that my HD I/O is way too slow? I need to try setting the scratch disk to the SSD, but there's only 24GB available. Total storage is about 128GB or something like that.
I was thinking of going with a USB3 External Raid 0 setup. Would this be a good fix for my Project files?
Any help is appreciated.
On an unrelated note, is it just me or is anyone else having issues using FireFox with this forum? My cursor keeps jumping back to a prior line of text! Super annoying.
Thanks!
Spacep0d

Answer 1

SSD Boot drive (OS)
Main Drive: Seagate Barracuda ST31000524AS 1TB 7200 RPM 32MB Cache SATA 6.0Gb/s 3.5" Internal Hard Drive -Bare Drive (Premiere installed here)
I have read other messages that indicate that PPro does not LIKE to be installed to anything other than the boot drive... and it sometimes (often?) does not work properly if installed to anything other than the boot drive
Since you have PPro installed to the same drive that you are using for video files, you are overloading your data transfer capability... in effect, you are using only one drive (see below)
Trying to use only ONE Hard Drive for Video Editing
You are a music conductor, with a baton that you use to point to various parts of the
orchestra... this is like Windows pointing to various parts of the hard drive to do
Windows housekeeping or to load program segments for various functions
Now, at the same time and with the same hand... while still using the baton to conduct
the orchestra... pick up a bow and play a fiddle... this would be doing something with
your video file at the same time as all the other work
You as a person cannot do both at the same time with the same hand
A computer is a LITTLE better, in that it can switch from one kind of task to another
very quickly... but not quickly enough for EASY video editing
You need AT LEAST two hard drives (separate drives, never a partition
http://forums.adobe.com/thread/650708 for more) with Windows (or Mac OS) and software
on your boot drive, and video files on a 2nd drive so the boot drive is not slowed down
by trying to do everything
Partition = Crash http://forums.adobe.com/thread/957286
My 3 hard drives for video editing are configured as...
1 - 320Gig Boot for Win7 64bit Pro and ALL program installs (2)
2 - 320Gig data for Win7 paging swap file and video project files
When I create a project on #2 drive, the various work files follow,
so my boot drive is not used for the media cache folders and files
3 - 1Terabyte data for all video files... input & output files (1)
(1) for faster input/output if you have 4 drives
- use drive 3 for all source files
- use drive 4 for all output files
(2) only 70Gig used, for Win7 & CS5 MC & MS Office & other smaller programs
Search Microsoft to find out how to redirect your Windows paging swap file
http://search.microsoft.com/search.aspx?mkt=en-US&setlang=en-US