JW...
I too have the RAID disabled...
I only have one hard disk (40GB Western Digital), but I have it partitioned into 4 drives... which is better than having one drive for everything; however, not as good as having completely seperate hard drives...
anyways drive C (3GB) is my main OS installation (WinXP) that I use for internet, graphics, my web designing I do, etc... it is what I am using right now...
drive D (6GB) has all my programs for both OS's... the programs for use with the main OS are in a D:\Program Files\ sub directory and for the DAW I use D:\Audio Program Files\
drive E (3GB) is my DAW OS installation (WinXP) that I use only for audio recording/editing and nothing else... in it all my USB ports, my printer, my multimedia sound card (cheap yamaha PCI64), and my network card are all disabled. Programs like Outlook Express, windows messanger, etc... have all been uninstalled as well... the only programs installed on this OS are my plugins and audio software... nothing else is installed or run on this OS, except for Internet Explorer when I see an update for something has come out.
drive F is all remaining space and is where my audio files are recorded to and saved.
Both OS drives are formated with the NTFS file system. The programs drive and the audio drive are FAT32.
I always defrag drive F after every recording project I do.
The remaining drives are defragged every week to every 2 weeks. If I haven't done or completed a project when I defrag the other drives, I just go ahead and hit drive F too.
The 40GB hard drive is primary on IDE1 running at Ultra ATA100 w/ the 4in1 VIA version 4.35 drivers.
On IDE2 my CDRW (Plextor) drive is master and the regular CDROM is slave on IDE2. Both CD drives are running at Multiword DMA mode 2
again both IDE3 and IDE4 (Raid controllers) are disabled in the bios. my bios is also flashed to the latest version.