I found [url=http://scsi.radified.com/scsi_01.htm]this site[/url] recently. This religion of the site seems to preach that a SCSI boot disk really makes a big difference and that the ultimate hard drive experience can be obtained with a SCSI boot disk (For OS, swap space and applications) and then cheap IDE disks for mass storage. My current system has SCSI built into the motherboard and has always had a 18 GB Ultra160 15krpm Seagate Cheetah drive as its boot drive (C:). The system also has dual CPUs at ~1.3 GHz each. I've always attributed the system's snappy performance to a combination of these two items. After several years I have seen no sign of this system starting to age (though I have yet to purchase Doom III and test it out). Thus, as a "tech tip" I recommend this configuration from personal experience (with the above website as my eyewitness). Bear in mind however, that SCSI drives are at typically 5x the price of typical IDE disks of similar capacity, so you really have to weigh the benefits. Well, early on, my C: drive quickly became too constraining as I started to get into some video editing so I went and bought a (relatively) cheap Western Digital USB 2.0 external hard drive @ 120 GB. After extensive use throughout the year and an accelerated use over the last month (transfer of raw video files ~1.5 GB apiece, conversion to MPEG), the drive up and died on me a couple weeks ago (after only 13 months life!). I lost some video files of my kids and some recent pictures, which left me rather pissed. So I decided to get serious about it. First, I purchased a new SCSI drive: a 72GB Ultra320 10krpm IBM/Hitachi drive. I have to pick up the drive tonight and figure out how to install it... I consider this to be my second "tier" of storage (slightly slower spindle speeds) but it should be more than sufficient for video editing (yet to be proven). My plan going forward into the future is to build a RAID5 (a Redundant Array of Inexpensive Disks) which I can use as a long term storage mechanism. Of course my motherboard is a few years old now so unfortunately no RAID controllers built into the box, I'd have to go purchase a RAID controller. Anyone have any experience with RAID configurations that support redundancy (not RAID0)? Any recommendations in terms of cheap drives to build it with or controllers? I've begun to think that the ultimate path that this system might take will be as a dedicated Home Theatre Computer but I have a lot of research to do before I get into that. I figure with drive prices always getting cheaper, I can start up a RAID to store films (at DVD compression levels) without having to deal with finding disks, etc. I'm currently focused on converting my cartoon collection to the digital domain, but I figure a typical movie takes somewhere under 4 GB of disk space (excluding special audio tracks and features) and current drives have anywhere from 120 to 400 GB of space out of the box. That's somewhere between 30 and 100 movies "on demand" per drive.