Fits exactly with my experience. I've done some comparisons between my three workstations and my portable: disk speed is VERY important, and having the swapfile on another physical disk than the OS certainly helps. Disk speed consists of two aspects: access time and transfer speed. Access time is composed of seek time (cylinder to cylinder) and rotational delay. A high rotational speed means less rotational delay. It has no influence on seek time. A high rotational speed combined with a high number of sectors per track results in a high transfer rate. A properly defragmented hard drive results in a reduction of seek times, and a greater chance that "burst reads" are possible (reading a number of consecutive sectors, which is very fast). Hyperthreaded or not hyperthreaded doesn't make a significant difference in render speeds. Hyperthreading disabled resulted in a very slightly faster render on my P4 2.8 system. Hyperthreading enabled was beneficial for the other apps that ran simultaneously. As for 64bit vs 32bit: my Athlon64 3500+ performed about 20% faster than the Athon2700+ and P4 2.8, which indicates that 64bit doesn't speed up the renders, at least not significantly. Switching to WinXP 64bit had no influence on render times. Hope this info is useful to some of you out there.

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