Just curious, has anyone run a few 32M runs with some HDD monitoring applications to see what sort of hits are being addressed to the disk? This will solve all your questions of how important the drive is. You could also artificially cripple the drive by loading up the drive with some throughput tests while running SPi but this would also affect the memory available to SPi, skewing the results. If I had a second machine I'd try to run the HDD tests myself but all I have is my webdev server right now.
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