For the most part, I do agree... While hard drives are pretty much the slowest component in computers today, they can be pretty well optimized. Burst speeds may be faster on those high-end drives, but typically random access speeds are pretty similar among drives Way back when I had a pair of rapters in a RAID. I think I got around 250MB/s out of them. However, I later switched over to a single 200GB drive and the performance decrease was quite minor and unnoticeable. Also now, one of my drives in the i7 920 is an IDE (thus a 133MB/s cap). Under most circumstances I really can't tell that much of a difference between it and my SATAII drive. The only time I really notice a difference is when I start trying to load many things at once, or load a game while/right after Windows loads.