so where do you keep your windows partition and your paging file partition?

On the raid disks or on the non-raid disk?

paging and windows on the RAID disk, ghost image of Windows install on CD/backupHD :)

I'd like to have a RAID setup, too bad it's not affordable. and then you have spent e.g. 150€ on 2 80GB drives. it's faster but not very reliable :/

buying 2 20GB drives would be perfect, but those drives are slower and make a LOT of noise :/

isn't there an other way to speed up HD acces, e.g. like using the faster, outer rings of HDD's to store windows/games, and the slower, inner rings for movies/music/etc. ?

it's called defrag ;)
OODefrag can move most used files to the beginning the disk for faster access.

sure, but how does that work with different partitions?

don't use partitions, no advantage.

I have to use partitions, check my HDD

in a HDD there are multiple platters, isn't it possible to optimize your partitions for this?

platter1: first winxp, then win2000, then a piece of the archive
platter2: user files and games
platter3: linux + rest of archive

I guess not

HDD layout:

tweak xp mentioned that the best place to put your paging file is on the first partition because in theory, windows is supposed to put the first data on the fastest reachable spot on the platters (I thought it was on the inner side of the platters but since TeuS says it's on the outer side I'll go with that ;)), offcourse, this is windows so it's very well possible that the first partition won't be on the fastest reachable spot on the platters.

I don't know if this still works with two disks in RAID 0 though :?

it should be the same with raid