An administrator is sizing a new server for a 500GB database application. Which of the following components on the server will provide the BEST performance?

Disk speed affects read/write throughput, but RAM caching reduces disk access frequency so dramatically that disk alone is not the best single performance lever.

The processor handles query execution and sorting, but database workloads are typically memory-bound before they are CPU-bound.

Database engines use RAM to cache table data, indexes, and query results, minimizing slow disk reads. With a 500GB database, maximizing RAM allows more of the working data set to reside in memory, which is orders of magnitude faster than any storage medium. RAM is consistently the most impactful hardware component for database server performance tuning.

The network card affects data transfer speed to clients but is rarely the bottleneck for a server-side database application.