I have had really good luck using this setup for editing and I figured I'd pass it along:
If your PC has the ability to use more than 1 GB of RAM, fill it up and GET A RAM DISK PROGGY.
http://www.arsoft-online.de/products/product.php?id=1You can get a freeware RAM Disk driver at this link.
Why? I set this up on my win 2000 PC with 1.5 GB RAM and it positively beats the PANTS off ANY hard drive you can find for throughput. I did a test on my machine with RAM disk vs. hard disk and the results were dramatic. Normalizing a 80 minute set of 16/44.1 took 2 minutes 30 seconds without RAM Disk, with 1 GB RAM Disk it took 1 minute 10 seconds.
1 GB of RAM is not that expensive, either. Maybe $150 if you get 2 sticks of 512 MB.
and all you have to do is point your software to the ram disk as the swap or data location and it doesn't know the difference.
E-mail me at jmnospam@adelphia.net if you have any detailed Q's.