one of my u10's has 3 120G disks in it.  one is an ata100 attached
to the internal drive and used as boot drive and /backup.  the other
two are sata drives configured with raidframe raid1 on netbsd.  i
see raw disk speeds ranging from 57MB/sec to about 40MB/sec on the
sata disks.  i used to have 40GB/5400rpm ata100 disks in that
machine as well.  both upgrades (from the original 9G disk, to ata100
raid1, to sata150 raid1) made the machine feel a lot faster for me.
in particular, access speed to my mail seemed to double each time.

another u10 i have recently setup has an 128MB ide/flash as it's
boot "disk" and an ata100 controller and raid1.  


not using the onboard IDE in those systems turns them into almost
decent machines :-)


.mrg.