(some additional suggestions to go with your very good summary) > There isn't really any way of improving the speed of a SATA drive - they > should run at top speed already. If you used IDE drive, there might've > been some settings to tweak for maximum throughput - but with SATA those > are moot (and no, IDE is not faster than SATA :) Picking drives with NCQ is enormously helpful. > * high-end HDs, e.g. 10,000+ RPM. These can improve your performance > somewhat, in the range of 10-20% - but it stacks on top of performance > gain of alternate filesystems. This is probably the cheapest upgrade path. Also more but smaller disks. 8 40 GB disks have much better seek behaviour than a single 320GB disk. They also take up a lot of room and power 8( > * if you want to go all out, try getting a RAM drive. You insert > standard computer RAM into it and your computer sees it as an HD. Very > fast and very expensive (cost of RAM) If possible just stick the extra RAM in the PC and tune it to cache a lot or use tmpfs. Main memory is much better connected to the CPU than SATA ram disks. Alan
