Use a Ramdisk

[kanewolf]

I noticed that when rendering the disk activity is high.  Since RAM is so cheap any more, if you have 4 GB ram, I recommend making a ramdisk and rendering to that device.

See http://www.mydigitallife.info/2007/05/27/free-ramdisk-for-windows-vista-xp-2000-and-2003-server/ for a setup article.

I really can't quantify the speedup, but if you have a slow disk, it HAS to be faster.