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I use Adobe Premier 5.5 to edit my videos. I have always seemed to have slow editing. I upgraded the PC which now has
8 Core
16gb of DDR3 2333mhz ram
1gb 460 gpu
6 hard drives, 1 is SSD
So, I think that it's my hard drives which are slowing everything down. I wonder if the amount of HDD's I have that is slowing it down, even whilst on my SSD it's still visibly lagging.
If you have a 8 core CPU I'd bet it is a fast one too, so that shouldn't be a problem. 16 GB is more than enough for HD, and DDR3 should ensure the speed. The GPU shouldn't have much to say as long as it's not crap.
If you have 6 slow harddrives, it would be a bottleneck. You should have at least 7200 rpm disks!
Drives are definitely the answer. My miniDV setup worked fine with 5400rpm, but HD playback looked like internet video from 2004. Upgraded to 7200rpm internal SATA drives, and ~most~ of the time, I've got good results. While I've never done any work with SSDs, I suspect those would be the ideal circumstance.
For external drives, I've used 5400rpm USB2.0 and FireWire (ieee1394) with DV just fine, but even with external drives, there may be bus speed issues on top of drive speed issues.
One thing that I have had good luck with is DSLR footage. I shoot 1080i on CF cards and 720p on SD Cards. I've got an internal SATA card reader, and I've been very impressed with throughput directly from the cards.
I've found that most editing lag these days is more related to drive speed than anything else. Most people doing video editing are savvy enough to at least know to ask "Will video editing need a more robust machine?"
RAID 10 is something I'm exploring right now. It supposedly combines striping (for faster access) with mirroring (for reliability) on a 4-disk array. Some IT professional friends of mine say that it's stable enough that they're putting the OS on the same physical drives as the data. An interesting thing to consider.
Hope this helps...or if nothing else, helps corroborate other information and ideas you're hearing.
A common problem for a slow edit is incorrectly setting the codec of the sequences.
Unless under very specific circumstances (of which I'm not sure of), you should set your sequence codec (when you create the new sequence and Premiere asks you what preset it should use) to be identical to your footage.
