Storage performance
I've been thinking about storage a lot lately, since I have to buy some pretty soon. Did you know that there is a factor-of-40 difference in speed among common storage devices? At the very slow end of the scale is any USB 2.0 device. These all top out at about 50 MB/s, the limiting factor being the speed of the USB 2.0 interface. If you have any USB 2.0 storage that you actually use, please upgrade now. Then we have FireWire devices at about 80 MB/s. Remember when FireWire used to be fast? Those days are gone. Next up is a surprise: any NAS device. If you're using 100 megabit Ethernet then NAS is totally hopeless, but even with gigabit Ethernet you're limited by the Ethernet cable to about 100 MB/s. It doesn't matter how hot the NAS device itself is. You might think that NAS is great for storing photos and music and such (how many times have you heard "just install some drives in a Linux box and make a cheap NAS") but the performance is pretty poo