Heh. Yeah, i know how bad it can get with slow drives.

I had a client that had a machine that instead of the 40GB HDD it had when it died, he took a 5400RPM HDD with 2MB Cache and was 10GB from an older tower (ATA-16MB/s) and put it in the tower. Mind you, it was running XP Home on it, and he was too cheap to buy a new HDD. Which a new 100GB would have cost him a total of $30.

That thing, with a NEW install, took about 1.5hours to install, and took like 5 minutes to boot. Just because of the slow HDD.

I think he actually was blown away when I got him to upgrade to a 160GB HDD. The thing, from a cold install, took like 45 seconds to boot, and another 30 seconds to be usable.

You should see how quickly my server 2003 Pentium IV w/ HyperThreading is to boot.

I have a PCI SATA-150 card and dual Terabyte drives in RAID-1, and the thing takes less than 30 seconds to boot and log in with some of the mods I have done (Turn off the Boot Screen, do some registry mods) and it's good to serve.

A lot of the time, the Server Sharing turns like like halfway through the boot sequence (before the auto-login) and it's ready to access.

It is so awesome when you have a fast HDD. It totally rocks