Tiny, in plain language, after the CPU processes the instructions to "render" a line of the picture, the results of that process have to be stored (first in a small buffer file in RAM) and then out onto the hard drive. Line by line. So, the hard drive can be a bottleneck. Poser and Vue use two entirely different methods for "rendering" a picture, (calculating the light path coming from each light source, calculating the impact of the light on each object, calculating the shadows, calculating the light bounced from one object to the next object, calculating the effect of light on the sky and the ground planes, etc. Vue has a much greater number of lights, objects, shadows, etc. to handle than Poser, and much greater number of geometric light calculations to make. So, a person would expect there to be significant differences between the two programs. The difference should lie in the direction that Poser would experience a proportionally greater increase in render speed because it has less to deal with. Am still researching out the performance of these SATA drives, but I'm with Thalaxis. I'd mess with the Virtual Memory (VM) settings to try to increase your "buffer" or "cache" space first. Still pursuing this, Tiny....... we haven't forgotten you.