I am buying a new Western Digital Raptor 74GB hard drive and I'm wondering since it's OEM, do I need any special software to reformat it? It's going to be used with latest hardware (Asus P4P800-Deluxe).
No, you don't. Now, all of the late operating systems format for you. OEM just means it doesn't come with the extra goodies like bells and whistles such as a file optimizer, or pcquickfix (made up name), etc.