[brazilio]

I personally use a couple of 15k RPM 73GB scsi disks set up in a raid 1 with some good soundproofing, but all you really need to check is seek times and somewhat pay attention to cache size. Eventually you get onto limited improvements the quicker your disks rotate. And yes, the trick to speeding up pokertracker is to stop using an access db. I'll take SCSI over IDE/SATA any day unless I'm looking for a cheap huge disk array where I've got a good number of failsafes. IDE disks especially are built for desktop use, not longterm hard disk usage. SCSI disks are built for server usage, where access is going to be hard and continuous. The strange thing is, from what I understand the actual platters are pretty much identical, the only difference is the disk hardware, cooling, and some mechanics.

There are some very good SATA disks out that may not eclipse SCSI in quality and performance, but they're certainly a damned good substitute for half as much money.