Attached Link: http://www.tomshardware.com/storage/20020305/index.html

That's correct, crocodilian. And the memory access speed is directly reflected by the bus speed. If you can get your hands on a RamBus or DDR 533/600MHz-bus (or whatever the fastest is these days) motherboard and the proper memory, it will make a large difference. Disk performance is difficult though. You can't get much better than 7200RPM unless you want to go SCSI 10000RPM and spend money like there's no tomorrow (they are prohibitively and ridiculously expensive drives, not directly supported by Windows, and comparable to the newest drives in every other way). You can look for the fastest read/write speeds and that'll help. The WD 8MB cache (also 7200RPM) drives that I mentioned will definitely help. Make sure it's UDMA. Beyond that, there isn't too much else. Bandwidth (33/66/100/133 that you see for IDE interfaces) is not as much of an issue. At 133, you are only getting 33% performance increase over 100. And since most hard drives only support about 50MB/s, 100 or 133MB/s doesn't really make a difference, now does it?