It's not recommended to use RAID as your boot up device. It will not properly function like you would want it to. There is no performance gain or any increased finctionality in using it. Use the main Primary controller for your OS drive and set the CDR/W to slave off of that.
I would leave the WD drives to themselves to get optimum performance. Remember that the only way to get good performance from RAID is to do a striped data. Also remember that since it's only striped and not mirrored if one drive goes down you lose half of your data. If you choose Striped and Mirrored you lose performance.
The onboard game port actually caused a friend of mine's system to go haywire and lose the USB functionality. So I would venture to say that using that is a no no. I would say to use the Midi ports on the Layla. As well as the SPDIF. The less you use on the mainboard the better as that will allow other cards or features to work smoother.
The less complicated you make it the better.
You will only be able to use the Layla inputs and not multiple inputs from other sources as that is the limitations of ASIO based applications.
Opus

How do you do it Opus? Thanks for the speedy feedback. I will go and switch the IDE's right now. Seems a shame not to use that whole extra pair of IDE's though.

Cheers!

Hi Opus,
On the above DAW, I have a harddrive with Windows 2000 from my laptop that I installed in a removable bay. However, when swapping the Maxtor that has XP OS on it, with the 2000 laptop drive and rebooting, either nothing happens or a "NTLDR is missing" error comes up and nothing boots.

Am I being silly here in thinking I can just physically swap the boot drives and it should work?

Huh???? Is there some type of adaptor that allows a laptop drive to be put into an IDE removable bay system? If so that's pretty cool but the question of why?
Usually it's not recommended to just put a drive into a new system. The reason being is this.
When you install an OS it reads the BIOS and any chipset and other components of a specific system and when you switch systems it looks for the old components and will not work properly. So basically, yes, you are correct in assuming that you are silly :D

Hey Opus,

There is a 44pin to 40 pin and 12V to 5V adaptor that you can pickup at Fry's for $6.99. Works like a charm. The reason for my desire...to keep my internet connection/game playing, multi program installed drive, as the laptop is old, slow and bugging me. But M$ has apparently made this switching bootable drives across systems impossible to do on 2000 and XP.

My next action is to buy another harddrive, and try to move the files to the new drive and cross my fingers to see what works. $%#@*&!

All this to keep the internet etc from touching the DAW, but be able to use the same machine.

Thanks for your help. It looks now that I should have gone for the P4B533-V huh?

laptop to desktop adaptor....pretty cool! But, as I mentioned it's not something that's really doable since it was installed on a different type of machine...BIOS, registry and hardware differences cause major issues! Most people have to do a fresh install to get it to work properly.
Remember, I do have internet capabilities on my audio machine, granted it's through a FireWire card on my home network setup but it's flawless. I do all my internet surfing on my server machine but I can easily get any downloads/updates from my audio machine in a flash plus I can share files with the two other machines as well.
Audio runs just as good.
Yes, The V model would have been better.
Opus