And the not many spindles. Three drives in RAID5 means that every write goes to two of the three, so it's scarcely faster than if they were all sharing just one drive (though of course it's much more resilient).

On Linux it's a big win to make sure that your filesystem blocks are aligned with the blocks of the underlying RAID, but I've no idea whether the same applies to Windows and/or VMWare, or how to frob it if it does.

Peter