Here is a description of my current desktop workstation

General

   CPU: q6600 2.4ghz quad core
   Ram: 2G DDR2 1600
   Video: Some high end 2GIG Vram card.

Disks and Arrays

   Boot Disk:                                 1  WD 10K raptor
   Programs and general storage:              3  500 gig sata

   Swap for OS and PS:                        4 15K u320 20 gig scsi disks (a total of 80 gigs in raid 0. FAST!)
   U320 controller:                           1 PCI-E single channel controller

   VM raid array:                             6 10K u160 scsi disks approx 40 
   u160 controller:                           1 PCI single channel caching smart raid controller (on the 33mhz pci buss instead of a 64.. only does ~120MB/s)


Displays:

   Main Display:                              1 1600 x 1200 LCD
   Secondary Display:                         1 2048 x 1152 LCD


The disks and disk arrays are what really sets the machine apart from a normal PC.  
I did some tests of various disks and compared them.  The results below speak for
themselves.  The test was using the disk or disks as a swap file for photoshop
and setting photoshop up so that it used the scratch disks heavily.

7200 RPM IDE disk: 1974.9 seconds
10,000 RPM Raptor: 481.5 seconds
15,000 RPM SCSI: 128.7 seconds


In otherwords, what would take a normal PC almost 2000 seconds (33 minutes) to do, MY machine
does in 128.7 seconds (2.1 minutes) thanks to the fastest spindles on the planet
and a good high throughput controller.  You can see why I consider it a workstation
and not a PC.  Splitting your workloads works and works well.  Since disks are by far
the slowest part of a modern computer, it makes sense that improving them would make
the biggest impact on daily computing and anything that requires huge amounts of fast,
low latency I/O.


-C