How are you set up hard drive wise? For most people now it seems the hard drive is the issue. If you haven't already, consider moving to SSD, and if you can arrange very regular backing up to a standard external HDD, then you should probably arrange a couple of SSDs in a RAID 0 array (for absolute maximum performance, however it'll set you back a few hundred dollars).

The speed of accessing the drive in certain ways might jump about 50 times if you did this.

PS2 or GBC, because they were the consoles I've used most. PC gamed more than either of those though. This should be a poll really (we can exclude most of the non-major 70s and 80s consoles).

SNES RPGs are awesome

FFX

By a long way, although I enjoyed many other games.