Not sure why people got confused here but I wasn't suggesting you go buy an array of SAS drives for SEPM. And obviously that kind of hardware is not dedicated solely to SEPM, the server does other things.
Thanks to both of the Symatnec people that posted on here, the information is helpful. I'll leave Adam to answer the questions because they're not intended for me, but I will say that question #1 that Elisha posted can be answered on my end by me saying that just launching the SEPM icon, waiting for the username/pw screen to come up, and then the process of logging in locks up, sometimes completely, sometimes just delayed for an excessive period of several minutes.
If I have the ImportPackages folder view open, I see this behavior stop as soon as that folder empties, indicating in my mind clearly the processing of this 450MB def file is what's killing the Symantec processes, and yet, the rest of the server does not appear to be severely affected. This tells me there's probably a software setting for SEPM or the db where something is being throttled, probably to prevent the Symatnec stuff from potentially killing a production server's I/O. That probably means engineering knows about this issue and is working on finding ways to optimize things. I'll trust in that getting done. If this issue were affecting my customer's servers I'd b eupset, but I see it mainly on my own test server which is not equipped with high-end disk subsystems.
On the othe rhand, I Have one client runing their SEPM on a Wion 7 single-disk box without much issue either, OR, I haven't tried to log in at that magical moment when it's doing the def file thing.