RAID Can Save the Day Dept. But with eight drives, I suppose you get close to that. This seem to be the cheapest way to enhance system performance. You've got to have a fast, efficient Website that delivers what customers need in a matter of a few seconds. As pointed out in the above quote, benchmarks and comparison tests can be very misleading.
Benchmarks are artificial in nature.
Comparison tests are also undependable. Not only can their be great variance in the quality of the implementation of the same program on different platforms, but the test can be selected with advanced knowledge of the probable results, biasing the test to produce the desired answers. NT on the other hand spends more and more time searching and updating the registry as the system ages and grows. If you wish to see how dramatic the impact on performance the existence of the registry is install a fresh copy of NT on a system and then add Computer Associates' Unicenter TNG Framework. Even if you never run the TNG framework every other program on the system will be slowed down because of the data added to the registry.