I agree with Gonz, speed up the slowest crap in the computer now, processor speeds are starting to get a little bit excessive when you compare the fact that they have multiple gigabytes of bandwidth with the fact that most midrange optical drives crawl along at a few megs per second and hard drives at 30-40 megs per second. To speak nothing of these mediocre floppy drives that for some reason, although they haven't been sped up for decades, are still being used, and still cause more problems when they're not installed than when they are. And then there's this crap called Windows...
I'd love to see what kind of difference it is going from a conventional computer with the latest greatest 60,000,000x speed single-beam CD-ROM drive and a single WD 800JB to one with a multi-beam CD-ROM drive and a raid array of 4 WD 800JB's, but alas, no money.
I have been pretty happy with the performance of my Seagate Cheetah X15 15000rpm U160 SCSI HDD and adaptec U160 controller.... but alas, I'm selling it.
I have a couple of rigs... the server/htpc is a Cel-T 1.2GHz (mega-mega quiet system) and my main rig in an XP 1800+@1938MHz.
IT IS SOOOOOO SLOW!!!
I can't tell you the amount of time I spend waiting around for this to encode, or that to filter, or this to rotate, or these files to copy, or this file to demux... it's infuriating. I have a Ti4400@fast and while it is fine for games (just a light gamer) I often wish it had more grunt when doing CAD/CAM work.
The fastest is never fast enough. It'll always be that way...
Interestingly enough, right now it's the slower of the two PCs that is the most rewarding to fuck about it. Mainly because it looks and sounds seriously good, hehe.