[Entity]

Bit of a long story, I'm going to try to make it short:

I'm tired of PT taking what feels like hours to import a few thousand hands, when I'm datamining, on a top-notch rig (AMD X2 Dual 4400+, 2gb RAM, SATA 7200RPM drive, blah blah blah). Generally I'm mining a fairly large number of tables distributed across a few PCs with VMWare running, but sometimes PT just seems to take a ridiculous amount of time to import the hands. When it's doing this, the PC is basically usable for web browsing, AIM, but that's about it; I can't do much in the way of poker. Ideally I'd like to try to get my home computer setup so that I can continue to mine on some tables while playing on another -- so I've decided to move the DB off to one of my other computers. Anyone currently doing this? I'd like to streamline it as much as possible.

Here are the setups that I have:

For playing:

XP 4400+, Dual Core, 2gb RAM (DDR400/PC3200, soon to be 4gb), 2x 7200RPM SATA HDS (250gb and 320gb). DFI Lanparty UT-SLI NForce4 board. Connected to LAN via a gigabit card and Netgear GS105 gigabet switch. System seems to scream for everything except PT. Ideally I will be running PAHud and Party on this machine. I also frequently run multiple instances of VMWare either to datamine or to work on other projects where I need multiple clients of XP running.

Setup #2:

Older Northwood core P4 3.06ghz. 2gb RAM (PC2100). MSI 845PEMax2 motherboard, Adaptec 29160N U160 SCSI controller + Fujitsu Ultra320 15kRPM HD (36.7gb). Also has an older 60 or 80GB Deskstar HD (7200RPM) that I wouldn't mind using as a backup drive for the DBs / installation drive.

Since I'm effectively trying to start from scratch here, I'd appreciate opinions on the best way to set everything up, given that I intend on having multiple million+hand DBs being stored on the computer. I'm considering running PT on both computers, but only running the observed DB on one of them; any sense to doing this? One of the reasons I'm doing this now is that I plan on getting a lot of data stored, and am hoping to do at least some analysis on it later on (mostly blind defense and things like that).

Anyway. Long story, tried to make it short, mostly failed. Would appreciate any comments before I plunge headfirst into this.

Rob