In computer terms the PT3/HEM DB sizes aren't very large at all. You should be able to store your DB and copies of all the HH files for a year in less than 250GB which is a very cheap disk size these days.
I would say that statement is relative. For a computer geek like myself you're right -- 250GB isn't much at all. But then again I have a total of 9 PCs, laptops, and servers within arm's reach in my home office, all with access to roughly 10
terabytes of storage, most of which is on a RAID5 NAS. And I still have a stack of 500GB drives on my desk from when I recently upgraded the NAS with 1TB drives. I should note that none of this was for poker, however.
But for typical home users (and I'd say poker players) running more ordinary PC's (especially laptops) 250GB is not a small amount of data, either. A lot of home desktops don't even have 250GB drives in them. But as I mentioned above, if available space is a problem, the cost to upgrade is so low as to make it a non-issue for any serious player.
And if you are grinding multiple tables for a significant amount of time you will probably have invested in a fast multi-core processor and a hardware based RAID controller with a good cache size and 5 disks so that you get good DB response.
Jilly, maybe you're being a bit tongue-in-cheek here (and
if you are) but if not then I'd be surprised to find any poker player, I don't care how much they grind, using hardware RAID and 5 disks simply to play poker. And if so, I'd say they've been misguided. RAID simply doesn't do much for single-user desktop performance, including database operations. Benchmarks have shown that even RAID0 striping, the fastest but also most vulnerable and risky of RAID topologies, generally don't outperform modern, fast HDDs in desktop scenarios.
Just having a reasonably fast HDD is enough from a poker software performance standpoint. A mirrored array like RAID1 would be useful for data redundancy, not performance. But I agree that a fast CPU and lots of RAM
are important if you're multi-tabling and running a HUD, and especially so if you're also running TableNinja or a bunch of AHK scripts, because all of these going on at once are both CPU and RAM intensive. Otherwise you'll find your HUD and hot-keys lagging as you open up a lot of tables. Personally I do run an overclocked quad-core CPU with 8GB RAM, but RAID is confined to my NAS where nothing poker-related exists (other than videos and TV shows). My poker PC's single data drive, a 32MB cache 750GB SATA model, is more than fast enough to keep up with poker database I/O. Even my laptop, a relatively modest (by today's standards) dual-core 2.4Ghz with 4GB RAM and dual 200GB drives (not sure if they're even 7200rpm) handles database I/O just fine.