What's the fastest way to store/access large files?

"Does your computer have an eSATA interface? eSATA is exactly the same as having the hard-drive connected internally in your computer, except that it's external. In other words, it uses the same interface as your internal hard drives and so they run at full speed (up to 300MB/s)

If you don't have an eSATA port, you can purchase an eSATA PCIe card to put into your computer."

For a good local option go with RAID 1, mirrored disks, with some good SAS drives at 15000 rpm. A step beyond that in complexity and price would be a NAS with some good RAID 5 storage, again SAS at 15000 rpm. The truly fastest option but probably completely unrealistic is a SAN. Though you could actually do something between a NAS and a full on SAN. Get yourself set up with a NAS on its own dedicated switch, and a different network. Then put another network card (gigabit ethernet) into your workstations(s) and use a dedicated network to access your NAS. Not as fast as 10gb fibre channel SAN, but should be really fast.