In the last 25 years CPU speeds have increased by 1000x, hard disk capacities have increased by 1000x, memory speeds have effectively increased by 500x, mobo bus data transfer speeds have increased by 500x and floppy disks have been replaced by flash disks, which are 100,000x larger and 1000x faster than a 1.44MB floppy. But hard disk access times and sustained transfer rates and IOPS have only increased by around 5x. So hard disk performance is the last bottleneck in the modern PC. In fact the modern PC has become a ludicrously overspecified mechanical hard disk controller. Every component within it cycles at speeds faster than 200 MHz except the hard disk which cycles at 120 Hz (7200 rpm) or 166 Hz (10,000 rpm) or 250 Hz (15,000 rpm).

There is presently only one way to fix this bottleneck. A Solid State DDR or NAND Flash drive. Please do not confuse flash SSDs with DDR SSDs. They are entirely different devices. Sure they are both solid state, but then so is a lump of concrete.

You will not double the real world performance of your PC by buying a faster processor, or a faster graphics card or a new motherboard. In many circumstances a large RAID system of the fastest hard disks will double overall system performance. But to achieve an order of magnitude improvement in real world performance you have to tackle the bottleneck of mechanical hard disk latency.

The most effective way of doing this is with a HyperDrive5 or a good SSD such as the Kingston HyperX series. The Kingston flash drives have faster Sustained Transfer rates, but their write latency is not as good as the HyperDrive5.

Intel and AMD and the memory companies and the PC magazines which earn advertising revenue from these companies will tell you that you should get a faster processor or a faster Memory stick or a faster Graphics card. But a typical Front Side Bus today goes at 800MHz with a 64bit memory word, which makes a 6400MB per second transfer rate (PC6400). Whereas your Hard Disk has a theoretical Max Transfer rate of around 80 MB per second (if it is a WD Raptor). And in the real world due to seek time delays it will actually be operating at between 10MB and 40MB per second. So your CPU is speaking to your memory at precisely 6400 MB per second because DDR is a Random Access and has a seek time measured in nanoseconds, whereas your Hard Disk is talking to your CPU at 50MB per second. So your HDD talks to your PC around 100x more slowly than your memory does.

That is the fundamental incompatibility in the modern PC.

Increasing the 6400MB per second figure is not going to help, when the bottleneck is the 50MB per second figure. The HyperDrive5 lifts that figure to around 160MB per second all the time, since it has an STR of 175MB/s Read and 145MB/s Write and as no seek time latency to speak of, being a random access device with a 10 microsecond access time. So adding a HyperDrive5 to your system will lift your HDD performance by 400%-1600% depending upon your circumstances. Buying a faster Processor or Memory stick will give you perhaps a 10%-20% real world performance improvement. The Hard drive is to a PC what speakers are to a HiFi. Running a Quad Core CPU from a Hard Disk is like running a Pink Floyd Stage Amplifier through a railway platform speaker!

For performance you must start with the Hard Drive.

The types of users who need DDR or NAND flash SSD performance are...

* Any real time business transaction system (business time is money)
* Any system where highly trained professional people sit in front of screens for hours (professional time is money).
* Any serious PC gamer
* Anyone who uses a PC more than one hour a week, whose time is worth more than �50 an hour
* Any system with a large database, any SQL performance database system
* Any network with more than 2 concurrent users, any heavily used webserver

Here are the SQL database performance figures from a large US customer who compared one HyperDrive4 with an Areca RAID controller against 14 SATA Hard disks.