There is a noticeable delay any time that the LifeDrive has to access the hard drive. For small programs, it's really not a big deal, since the performance is pretty snappy once the application is loaded into memory. Larger programs, however, will require occasional to frequent hard drive access, which does tend to slow things down (but only while the hard drive access is happening). I ran head-to-head tests between my T5 and my LifeDrive running applications that had already been loaded into memory on the LifeDrive. The T5 lost every "race" in those tests, so the LifeDrive is nice and fast except when it's playing with the hard drive.
There's a third party application called SharkCache that was developed to help with device speed by allowing you to set up caching for your frequently used applications. I have it on my LifeDrive, but I haven't tested it too much yet, so I can't really say how effective it is. It only supports a 4M cache size, so applications like Village Sim (with all the music files installed) aren't really helped by it.
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Barbara
Unicorn
Last Day of Work