Wing Commander Fowler,
It took me a little time to type all that out with my two fingers, (I know, such a shame, I never learned to type!), but I was able to get a post up for you in the end.
If you are looking to boost your disk access, another solution for you is putting two IDE Drives on a PCI RAID controller. If you use RAID 0 (w/16k Stripe) you will seriously boost your disk access performance. (ATA-100 PCI RAID Cards are cheap, and with a pair of Western Digital WD400JB or WD800JB Drives you will not break the bank.)
I am running a pair of Raptor Drives on my onboard SATA RAID Controller with a 16k Stripe. You can see how fast a pair of drives are: (I used
HDTach 2.61 for the benchmark. They have 2.7 available for download if you want to benchmark your hard drives.)
It is more than double the throughput of any 7200rpm Drive w/8Mb Cache.
Take Care,
Richard