"Larry Dighera" wrote in message
...
I stayed with a 160
GB hard drive, figuring that'll keep us happy for now.

Have you considered the speed advantage of a SCSI HDD? More often
than not, it is the HDD that slows a computer system's response time;
they are never fast enough, IMO.

This is no longer true (and hasn't been for a while now). With ATA150 (and
of course now with SATA), the bottleneck is typically in retrieving the data
from the media (that is, the drive itself). The interface plays little part
in the overall throughput of the data.

If you want to speed disk access, the solutions involve making it faster for
the drive to provide the data. Two common methods are larger buffers on the
drive (only help up to a point...read enough data at once, and the buffer
doesn't get "refilled" fast enough to help), or using RAID. The latter is
very effective, if the array is configured for performance (not all RAID
modes help performance...only the "striping" modes do). Of course, disk RPM
and areal density improve performance as well. Disk RPM in particular is a
big factor.

For best speed, set up a striped RAID array of 10,000RPM drives. It'll cost
a fortune, but you won't ever spend much time waiting on the disk.

Pete