Well, if you *really*really*really* want to you could probably split things across 2 drives, one for mostly read-only data and one for writing. Writing being slow bothers me because Windows has a habit of using the swap file quite often even if you have loads of RAM. If you have any kind of logging turned on then you are usually writing to the disk all the time as well but usually disk writes go into a cache these days that gets flushed to the disk periodically, if I am not mistaken. I could be talking out of my ass, not an expert on HDD.