Kayle,

1. HDD speed: How hard disk (I/O speed) intensive is freesurfer? What kind of

speed difference will having a RAID make? Would there be a big difference from plain SATA?

Gererally RAID would be most beneficial for computers running large number of search and read operations (i.e. database queries in large databases) as it requires number of rapid movements across large surface of the disk and there are some constraints of how quickly search and read can happen. That is one of the reasons why people use raid arrays. However, I doubt if in your case you will see much of the difference in performance. However, I would consider having two RAID mirrored drives that will impove security of you data. In case one of the drives fails some or all data from the other drive can be recovered preventing data loss.

2. RAM amount: How much memory does running recon-all for one subject generally

require? Is it 0.5-1.5GB? Would 2GB be enough to run two simultaneously or do I need 4GB? Or 6GB? How much RAM does running a group map for functionals need?

Standard seems to be 4GB you may be able to get away with 2GB and I would not recommend less than that. Please note that those are only my wild guesses.

3. RAM speed: We are buying DDR400 PC3200 RAM. Should I bother paying more for low-latency timings?

Don't bother paying for faster memory, your bottleneck is your harddrive not your memory.

4. Graphics speed: What speed graphics card is good enough for tkmedit and

tksurfer? Is a Geforce 6000 series plenty, or does having a 7000 series make any difference?

See this website for benchmarks of videocards: http://www.tomshardware.com/site/vgacharts/index.html

-jacek