Paul, PCs work differently to a mac - you cannot (permanently) disable virtual memory on a PC and have to use some disk space as VM with consequent performance hits, hence the major speed difference in the past between the two platforms. Once upon a time, I did disable VM on a PC; the speed was incredible, but after 30 mins it crashed and burnt as the errors built up.
To get back to the point - I have recently proved for myself that installing a fast ide drive as boot drive on my PC workstation cuts performance by some 50%. I normally run 10K scsi drives. The optimum configuration would be 5 x 15K scsi drives - one for boot, and two sets of striped raids on separate buses - one for photoshop scratch and one for the windows scratch disk: it could be a tad pricey though... I have several IDE drives (WD 200GB!) in LaCie D2 firewire cases and they are exceedingly quick. Great for external storage and ideal for off site storage too. For anyone interested; the only way to mix scsi and ide on a pc is to use an ide drive as the boot drive with attendant performance problems. NickWB. ATA drives don't lag as far behind SCSI as they used to. My old IBM120GXP is almost as fast as my Apple installed 36Gb 10,000rpm SCSI on a fast card. My Twin 120Gb raid is faster. And you get much better value for money. But it all depends on your budget. If you can afford it, sure get 15,000rpm SCSI's. The Western Digital 200Gb is well fast. Paul =============================================================== GO TO http://www.prodig.org for ~ GUIDELINES ~ un/SUBSCRIBING ~ ITEMS for SALE
