Good idea. When computer manufacturers design retail-grade computers, they know that those machines won't be doing much I/O. So they often design very low-grade IDE channels and put them "conveniently" on the motherboard. And they sell disk drives that, while extremely
capacious, are also very slow. The machine works, but it can barely get out of its own way once the signals have to leave the motherboard. (And sometimes there is a rather shocking difference between how fast the
CPU is said to perform and how fast the
board can perform... and of course "guess who wins.") The biggest bottleneck is, and always will be, I/O. (By adding RAM you are basically "avoiding I/O.")
You might be able to transform the machine outright by:
- Adding more RAM.
- Installing a separate EIDE-controller card.
- Installing a USB-2.0 / Firewire card.
The folks who design off-board peripheral interfaces
expect that many of the people who buy them "want more." Now, IDE (no matter how you slice it) just
isn't tremendously-fast just because of its design. But if you want to watch a piece of hardware
jump, try using Firewire. This is the latest incarnation of SCSI and
ka-a-a-a-zing!