since we are talking formats and partitioning, just a little hint for all of you who resample really really big files (ala photoshop rendering or wavelab resampling) partition your hard drive to give you one partition for your OS and one for everything else. will speed things up immensely and keep your OS running quickly.
Not too sure if that kind of partition does you any good from a performance perspective. Because it's a logical partition, you're still using one drive with the same read/write heads and they can only be in one place at a time. Logical partitions are great for keeping things separate, running ghost images and backups etc.
In my various computers, anything on a single drive is still pretty rotten compared to 2 physical drives - a single laptop drive is even worse. On my desktop pc, a separate controller card seems to make a difference, even against onboard controllers that are supposedly ATA 133. In both cases, the audio temp files are on another physical drive.
Here's the results of opening a 1.7GB 24 bit audio file in CEP 2.1 (where the entire file must be read and peak sampled). This is mostly and I/O disc intensive task.
laptop, single 4200 rpm drive with a separate logical partition for OS and data - 41 minutes
desktop, 7200 rpm drive, promise ATA100 controller - 2 min40 sec
desktop, 5400 rpm drive, motherboard controller - 5 min30sec
I don't have the patience to do anything on the laptop!