Working huge uncompressed footage

Hi all.

When I export my After Effects project as an uncompressed avi (bad boy is about 49gb for 8min of video), and then import the file into premiere to re-attach my audio, Im having some problems.
More often then not, Premiere will just crash at the thought of working with such a large file. I cant preview the footage in the preview pane or, again, premiere will crash.
Eventually I decided to not look at the footage and just export it as an MPEG2 Blu Ray so I can see what it looks like, but I stopped after 10 minutes. Premiere had rendered 80frames out of 13,000 and the eta was still going up (passed 10 hours ftw!).
So whats the solution? Should I just export a low quality version of the footage (The original footage is HD 1080 50i @25fps), use it to make sure all my audio is lined up properly, then bring in the uncompressed and leave my pc for about 4 days?

Any ideas or information about why this is happening would be shweet.
Cheers
Dave

(I have 4gb or ram, 2.4ghz quad core, 7950gt (256mb) and 700gb of sata, i thought these specs were ok, but could the hdd be the source of my slow rendering woes)