Originally Posted by Peter Brayshaw

On my old Pentium 4 my boot time was about 35-40 second flat. That was into the desktop with everything ready to go. Currently its a bit closer to a minute. Takes the comp about 30 seconds to get through the bios screen and raid config screen before windows starts up.

yup, the more complicated the OS gets and the hardware and multiple controllers etc etc etc the longer boot time gets
Anyhow this is confusing. Every place I check says something different. I'm not worried about the risk of raid 0. I have faith in WD drives, and I don't keep much of value on my main drive besides saved games and such. A crash would be very frustrating, but nothing major would be lost.

no drive make is worthy of such confidence, they all have their fair share of duds. my personal record right now is 4 dead drives in one month!
image programs such as drive image xml (free) would take all the nasty out of recovery!

If I were to do raid0, what would be a good cluster size? Any thoughts?

there are many schools of thought on this topic, but I would opt for 64k stripe size and 4kb cluster size >>>>
http://www.tomshardware.com/forum/16...2x74gb-raptors but its your call ????

I could use two drives, one for my OS and one for all my software. But I usually reformat about once a year for good measure. Once I reformat the OS drive I would break all the links my software has to the OS and needed recourses ... seems like it could be trouble... or am I totally misguided on that one?
you are correct on that one, the windows registry would not have the enteries to run the software you have ??

-Pete