What your computer does while you wait

Outstanding read on speed, latency, throughput

I really enjoyed reading this article (link below); it really uses some good analogies to come to conclusions that most of us already know - get a box with as much L1 and L2 cache as possible, and as many spindles as you can for the highest throughput. The disk is obviously the bottleneck still, so beef this area up for maximum performance. Also, controller cache is extremely important. Calculations should be made to understand the size of the reads/writes that SQL Server is performing for a given application, and make sure that sure that controller cache is not smaller than this amount.  Finally, don't mix asynch and synch reads and writes. Enjoy!

What your computer does while you wait
http://duartes.org/gustavo/blog/post/what-your-computer-does-while-you-wait

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Or, optionally, go with Google's model - 700,000 servers with 2 petabytes of RAM.