Solid State RAID or no? GTX 470, playback is jumpy still

Question

I am currently shooting with 3 Sony HDR CX550v cameras. When trying to edit it's very jumpy, almost impossible to edit. I used to use 3 Sony HDR SR1's. Both used AVCHD codec. On CS4 I was able to edit 3 tracks and sometimes more and it would scrub decent and playback most of the time decent, it was bearable at least. Transitions would be jumpy and I would render to preview when adding any effects. I knew I probably needed to upgrade my hard drives to a RAID.
Here's my Hardware as it was:
Intel® Core™2 Quad Processor Q9650 (12M Cache, 3.00 GHz, 1333 MHz FSB)
Asus P5K3 Deluxe WiFi Intel 935 Socket 775 Motherboard
EVGA GeForce 8800 GTS Superclocked 640MB PCIe
Western Digital Raptor 150GB Serial ATA HD 10K/16MB/SATA-150
2 more 320 GB Serial ATAHard Drives slaved
OCZ 850w GameXStream Power Supply
Corsair 8 GB DDR3 1333
Before I upgraded/installed Premeire Pro CS5 I reinstalled windows 7 64 bit, nuked everything, started fresh. Then installed CS5, then updated it. After trying the hack I replaced the EVGA GeForce 8800 GTS Superclocked 640MB PCIe that I though was future proof when I bought it over a year ago, the hack didn't work on the 8800 GTS despite the fact that it has over 100 CUDA Cores. I replaced it with a PNY GTX 470 so I could use the mercury playback engine.
It seemed at first to edit better with the GTX 470 then with the 8800 GTS in that transitions played back smooth. I even changed the brightness on one of the video tracks and it played back fine without having to render. But, about half way through I started experiencing jumpy playback.
I believe I need a better hard drive configuration. According to windows my primary hard disc is 5.9 out of 10, everything else is either 6.9 or 7.3. And, with the task manager open viewing the Performance while I play the timeline the CPU and memory seem to be doing great but playback is jumpy. So, I guess I need to upgrade to a RAID.
My mother board can do a RAID 0 or 1. But, I don't know enough about RAID to do it confidently and I don't trust anyone in this small town to do it for me. So, I need to know, should I:
do a RAID using my mother board to control it? if so, RAID 0 or RAID 1 (I can occasionally back up stuff to a slaved drive, right?)
do a RAID with 2 solid state drives or 2 hard drives?
Get a solid state drive for the operating system and have a RAID separately for programs?
do an eSATA RAID?
Serial Attached Storage (SAS)
iSCSI
Networked Attached Storage (NAS)
Number 5, 6, and 7 are some options my friend told me to look into. I did a little and being getting stressed with all the options. I really don't want to understand all the options, I just want to know what will work and move on.
I found on the forums something about RAID 3 being the best but a friend that knows about this stuff didn't know why that would be better than RAID 5.
I'm so swamped with my day job, being a father, and trying to get my video business going that I don't know if my brain can handle trying to figure out much more. I got excited about Solid State and thought that would be an easy option, but the more I got to digging the more I found that it has some flaws too.
The bottom line is, I just want to edit AVCHD without having playback issues during the editing process. I've tried Neoscene by Ceneform but that turned out to be converting the files to an insanely large size. I canceled the conversion when I saw that my 4.7 gig AVCHD was growing over 30 gigs! Yikes! and it was taking forever. I would prefer to not add another step to the work flow and what not. Life is too short for all that mess. I just need to edit without playback hesitations.
I'll move the timeline indicator and there's this annoying delay, I hit the space bar and delay, I playback and it's jumpy, I try to scrub the timeline and it's not showing anything. While there are some subtle improvements with the new graphics card and MPE enabled to use it, it's otherwise all worse than before it seems. PLEASE HELP!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Answer 1

Ok, I should have said this.
With my current processor and good old set up I didn't have these playback issues.
Now, here's an update, this is what I shared with someone else earlier today:
I am editing multiple tracks of AVCHD video. The project at the moment is about 50 minutes long with three video tracks. The computer has a fresh, new Windows 7 Pro 64 bit install on it. Really, that's all that's on my system along with the Adobe Master Collection CS5.
Since my change from CS4 to CS5 I have not been able to edit video as well, it's really bad now. First I reinstalled windows and installed CS5 and didn't change any hardware. The performance was not good so I removed my GeForce GTS 8800 video card and purchased and installed a new GTX 470 certified adobe video card. That didn't work so I purchased 2 new hard drives to create a RAID, that didn't work either, still the same performance issues. After all of this in the last week, and now I'm wondering what do I do next? Here is my system hardware at the moment:
Intel® Core™2 Quad Processor Q9650 (12M Cache, 3.00 GHz, 1333 MHz FSB)
Asus P5K3 Deluxe WiFi Intel 935 Socket 775 Motherboard
GeForce GTX 470 "Adobe Certified Video Card"
Two Seagate Baracuda 1 Terabyte drives for a RAID 0 using the ASUS RAID controller off the board
Western Digital Raptor 150GB Serial ATA HD 10K/16MB/SATA-150
2 more 320 GB Serial ATAHard Drives
OCZ 850w GameXStream Power Supply
Corsair 8GB DDR3 1333(Twin 3X2048-1333 C9)
I have the OS and CS5 on the RAID, the project on the fast WD hard drive, the media cache and preview files on a slaved drive, I even tried moving my media files to a slaved drive. It continuously, no matter what I do, performs the same.
The permance issues are:
when I move the timeline indicator there is often a pause before it will play
when i jump around using the page up and page down keys there is often a pause
when i move tracks there is often a pause
when I hit the space bar to preview there is a pause/delay, and then it may sometimes playback fine but in certain spots the video stops and then resumes and does this often
when i scrub the timeline the preview doesn't display
I did add one effect on one track, that is brightness, but that is all.
What's weird is when I would edit AVCHD in CS4 I didn't have these problems. But, in CS5 I do notice some minor improvements, like in CS4 simple default transition would hang up for a bit, but the rest of the editing experience was easy. This is the other way around. It plays through almost all the transitions, even when the brightness effect is on one of the tracks, but everything else is horrible!
I've also been trying different settings, I've updated my video driver, RAID driver, and everything else in the device manager looks great.
I need help bad, otherwise I'm going to have to return CS5 and go with a different NLE real soon. I've wasted too much time now, please help.