thanks i got rid of sidebar and windows aero b.s. i will update to the lastest drivers and see if that helps. i have alot of processes that are search exe. they are bogging up all my memory, do i delete these? thanks
I dont like running an OS over 6 months old. Too much rubbish builds up.
Install your OS then use BartPE and ghost an image of it and keep that stored elsewhere so you can install your ready to roll OS back in 5 mins.
Also use Xmarks with firefox and you always have all your bookmarks and passwords saved online not on the PC.
Hard drives I run a 75Gb WD Raptor as the main OS for super fast read/writes and have several Terabyte drives for the bulk storage, 4 of which are housed in a hot swap bay.
IME USB is totally unsuitable for holding files that you actually are using. Its fine for backing up when you start it copying and leave it for the hours it takes, but the CPU hit and slowness when using files off a USB drive will be far worse then any slowdown you have at the moment.
Get eSATA - either a PCIe card for a desktop or an expresscard for a laptop.
No massive CPU hit with accessing it, no inflated accesstimes because of the USB delays. And the cards are pretty cheap if you look around (dealextreme)
You can get a sata to esata adatper that will use a motherboard port, but just be aware that hotswap usually doesnt work properly on the motherboard ports without messing around to make it work.
Ditto on the NAS boxes - good ones are expensive. The cheap ones are .. well, cheap :-) There are trade-offs for being cheaper - like slow network speeds - many were clocked at around 15-20megbits/s. Others had their boot OS on the HDD, making the HDD difficult to replace. Some were only single HDD units. Bit pointless I'd thought. At the time there were too many limitations with the cheaper units, so in the end, I re-purposed an older HP box - 2.4ghz Intel, installed a SATA card and a couple of extra SATA HDD's, and installed Windows Home Server. WHS is a reasonably decent product. Specific folder duplication across multiple drives, meaning there is no loss of important data should a HDD fail. Media serving, etc
To help answer the original question, USB has a built-in latency of 10ms (from memory) so every time you request data from the hard drive it will take 10ms longer than if it was a SATA or eSATA drive. For low latency on external storage you want Ethernet or Firewire.
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