Basically I don't think I am getting the most from my system and I just wanted some advice on the best setup of it.

I've got An Epox Motherboard with raid
512mb 333 PC2700 ram
A P4 2.53Ghz
2 X 20Gig Maxtor's ATA100
1 X 80Gig Maxtor ATA100
1 Plextor Cd Burner (Only 16x write but its never let me down and is reliable)
1 generic Cdrom Drive
1 Pioneer 106d DVD burner
450 watt power

At the moment I have the 3 cdroms on the Main IDE channels, the Plextor as master on ide0 and the generic cdrom as slave on ide0. The pioneer is brand new and is master on ide1

My hard drives are coming off my raid, both 20 Gig Maxtor's on the first raid channel as master/Slave and the 80Gig Maxtor as master on the second raid. Windows is booting of one of the 20 Gig Maxtor's as master

My system is fine and never crashes but I have seen a few other systems over the last few days at work which are lower spec but seem ten times faster, granted at the moment it needs a format so is slow anyway but even from a clean format and full install of Windows Xp it still seems a slug compared to the others I have seen

I've got all the latest video card drivers, Bios updates for Mobo and Video card, got a fan at the front and fan at the back as well as fan on chip and the temp is always fine. I also make sure i've got the bare minimum running and clean the system regular with Norton

I've always built my own pc's and had no problems but I've never had raid before so bit unsure as to how to get the best from the system. I will probably get rid of the generic cdrom now that I have the pioneer

Any help would be appreciated

(A guy on Neowin suggested setting up a raid arry but i think for me its a bit overkill as i'm not doing any video editing or major intensive tasks)

First off, are you not using a RAID array? Chances are the ones at work are using one, and splitting data in half and sending each half to a seperate hard drive, which makes the drives essentially act as one, which means that the speed is drastically increased, but the downside is that if you have 2 20GB drives, only 20GB of data will be available for you to use. This is RAID0.

No I'm not using Raid A Array, one of the 20gigs is full and stuff cannot be deleted as its important. And the pc's at work are not using Raid Array, they are standard Dell optiplex's running at 2Gig

Needs a format? I have never known of a problem free system needing a format. You may need to defrag. Fragmentation will cause the system to be sluggish.

For info on RAID:
http://www.techspot.com/vb/showthread.php?s=&threadid=541

BTW Veh, I believe that explanation you gave about RAID is incorrect. The two 20s will not make 20, the size defaults to the size of the smallest drive x number in the array in RAID 0, does it not?