coyote255 - I think you were just looking for some benchmarks to start?  None of my best images take more than 10 minutes to render a screen sized image.  SOme things, in your render settings to whatch out for are Dissplacement, Raytracing, and Shadows(especially with alot of lights).  If you hav'nt a specifc need for any of these, it would save you much time to turn them off.  I've setup my render setting by starting with as little as possible, and then just adding/testing individual settings.  Honestly when I go back to the Automatic scale I'm really not anywhere near the higher "Quality" level.  I think of it as a huge Conservation!

When I want something huge, for a Poster/Print; then it's time to drop the Bucket Size, and let it run all night.

The rest of this  belongs in the Hardware Technical Forum:

A.) Poser does'nt use it's own swap file, it needs Windows's
B.) Poser can only get 2GB's(Or talk to Stwer for 3GBs,) of combined Physical RAM and Virtual Memory, from Windows.
C.)  If someone were to go out an purchase an external USB, on this advice, he/she would be very sad to know that USB is no where near as fast as a normal hard drive.
D.)  If you're still sharing the same IDE, of the Master drive, you may save tiem from armswing, but the two drive could only run at half speed ea. together.
E.) Even off the primary IDE(1) you still should check your manual for North and SOuth bridge bottlenecks, hte pipe feeding IDE1 may also be used for IDE2.  RAID-0 is term for using two hardrivees, simultaneously, to do the job of one, but I've seen plenty of new Mainboards that advertise RAID-0, but what they do'nt tell you is that would be for much much older IDE Drives.  IDE drives have run at 33MB/s, 66MB/s, ansd most recently 133MB/s.  So they say RAID-0, but do'nt mention that's not for 133MB/s IDE.  ;  (

FYI - SATA drives are 150MB/s, and SATAII is like 200MBs/sec.