Thread: I/O input/output speeds, program startup

I'm looking for better user interface speed. I just bought an Asus 2.5 gighz quad core 8gig tower. I heard recently that a 10000 rpm drive and/or raid setup can increase program startups by a lot. I'm assuming I have a 7200 rpm drive or such. I don't like any lag time and am looking for the best solution. I've done a little research and have found the Cheetah 15k rpm drives but it looks like their access times and mb/s times are not nearly as good as some others I've ran into and supposedly they're supposed to be the best as of right now? I'm not understanding all these specs and what exactly I need. I have 6 sata hookups that I can use on my mother board. Any suggestions?

Cheetahs are the best mechanical drives on the market for sequential use; Savvios are the best on the market for random IOPS. Both will flatten what you currently have, but they are enterprise level drives and require a SAS controller and connection. The best you can do with SATA in mechanical hard drives is the WD Velociraptor 10krpm drive. If you don't need a ton of storage space though, an SSD will give you incredible speed with a SATA connection and not too much noise or heat. The Intel X25-M is a very fast drive, and will even beat the Cheetah in almost every way. They are quite expensive per GB though.