Hard-drive bottleneck

[wakkoguy]

I have had my dell xps420 for about 4 months now and have always noticed the hard drive being really loud. I also noticed that when I was using photoshop, firefox, and picasa that the hard drive just couldn't keep up. I thought it was just cause vista was indexing but it is still constantly running and loud. Could my hard drive be bottlenecking my system? My specs are below:
q6600
500gb hd
8800gt
3gb ram

 

[error8]

The hard drive is the biggest bottleneck in any system out there, not just in yours. When we'll all shift to SSD drives there will be a different situation, but until then, you'll have to live with it as it is. Hard drives haven't evolved in recent years in terms of pure speed. Manufacturers have always concentrated in increasing their storage space, but never spent money in making them faster. Yes, you can buy a 10000-15000 rpm drive, but it's expensive, loud and has a very limited storage space and even then it will still be a bottleneck, since the cpu and ram are always capable in moving more data faster then the hard drive.

So to "ease" your bottleneck you can try putting two drives in RAID 0, or use the second one just for windows and swap. Oh, or get a 10000rpm drive or a SSD.