I have been syncing on a I7-2600 with two WD raptor 10k rpm drives in Raid0 @ 100% disk IO for over a week and only on block 2470271. Another rig I have has 4 drives raid 0 and it has been syncing for 3 days and on block 2425081. I think my drives might fail from the stress. Incredibly frustrating for people who want to support this cryptocurrency but unable to get on board and participate -- especially how the wallet software encourages people to put some ETH in their wallet during the installation process. I suspect some people will never be able to access the money they put into their wallets.
The inefficient manner in which nodes sync and process the chain doesn't make sense. Perhaps someone can explain why this is happening because other cryptocurrency wallet apps I have used (btc/ltc) do not exhibit this behavior syncing. It seems that segment downloaded needs to be processed into the db and this is taxing my HDDs and causes system to be unresponsive.
Since it is possibly to copy the chaindata from one node to another, it would be great to see a P2P download of a large portion of the chaindata db as a seed and then incrementally update. It would speed up syncing 100x!
For someone wanting support this cryptocurrency this has been an extremely frustrating experience.