The Tips in detail

 "MAX swaps everything to your HDD."

Due to the OS Max will transfer data to the swapfile from time to time, regardless of the amount of physical RAM you have in your machine.

So a fast HDD will pay, too. It is usually overkill to invest into an UltraSCSI-subsystem unless you already own vast CPU-power and loads of RAM (see also: "RAM pays a lot more than CPU-power.") It also pays to have your swap-space on a different HDD (perhaps a complete HDD on it's own). 500MB of swapspace is a good start but this might be to small for heavy face-counts and intense submaterials and is certainly to small for heavy use of particle systems.

A common rule of thumb is to make the swap-space three times + 10% the size of the installed physical RAM to be on safe ground.

Modern MotherBoards and (E)IDE HDDs can talk together via UltraDMA, but this is known to cause problems with NT4 (eg. computer refuses to boot or UDMA-HDD not present after booting.) IMHO you should prefere using SCSI over IDE since SCSI has several advantages compared to (E)IDE but is on the other hand more costly.

With HDDs like Seagates 20.4GB Baracuda one might consider purchasing such an ATA66 drive above SCSI drives. This might be a good choice, but depends on the task you are out to head the HDD to.

To give a hint: Max needs to write files usually between a few 100 kB and some 2-5 MB. I rarely encountered Max writing files above 5MB, but I'm not that deep into the ultra-high polycount region. What you should do is a regular save, preferably autosave, along with an increment of the filenumber (ie. test.01.max, test.02.max, ...). This gives you a (increasing) bunch of relatively small files. Same is true for your Materials (mostly a few kB) and your mapfiles (some 200 kB to some 2-3 MB). Working with Max means you will need to access small files of some 500 kB (roughly) average size.

Max loads mapfiles at first rendertime and when opening the materialeditor. Sceneries load "on demand", ie. when you load them. Saving occurs occassionally. Usually standard IDE drives can handle this task "left handed and one eye shut". What gives the thread is swapping. Using virtual memory needs a HDD as fast as possible. Ok, ATA66 Drives are fast. To get the most out of this, you should place the swapspace (pagefile) close to the inner tracks of your HDD, since transfer and access have best ratings here. Try to find out, how many individual discs and heads there are in your (desired) HDD. Estimate a partitioning pattern, that makes your swapspace close to the inner regions of the HDD. Remember Windows usually likes the very first partition to be drive "C:\". Calculate enough space for the first partition to hold your operating system and some software (2GB is good but...).