New Computer Rig suggestions pls?

[SlayerX]

Hello, been reading the forums for awhile and been 4 boxing on my xps notebook for abit and it handles ok minus cities and such , but now that i'm hitting my 50's and I want to get a new rig to handle outland and hopefully lich king.
I want to be able to 4-5 box on this.

So far I am going with:
quad 6600
Western Digital Caviar RE WD2500YS 250GB 7200 RPM SATA 3.0Gb/s Hard Drive - http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16822136055
GIGABYTE GA-P35-DS3L LGA 775 Intel P35 ATX All Solid Capacitor Intel Motherboard - http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16813128059
or
GIGABYTE GA-EP35C-DS3R LGA 775 Intel P35 ATX Dynamic Energy Saver Ultra Durable II Intel Motherboard - http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16813128082
Patriot Viper 4GB(2 x 2GB) 240-Pin DDR2 SDRAM DDR2 1066 (PC2 8500) - http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16820220299
EVGA 512-P3-N841-A3 GeForce 8800GTS (G92) 512MB 256-bit GDDR3 PCI Express 2.0 x16 HDCP Ready SLI Supported Video Card - http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16814130312

Have extra CD rom etc or might get a SATA one, sicne they seem to be cheap nowadays.

I was wondering if more then one Hard Disk route is way to go, cause I've been reading that its possibly better to spread wow out over more then one drive, I'm thinking maybe of getting 3 drives (A would be wow1 and OS etc, B would be two wows, C would be two wows) Would this help performance at all?

Also debting on getting 64bit windows xp (for the 4gb ram issue) or going to vista

I have yet to look at cases, so taking suggestions on what would fit this all nicely too.

Thanks all that respond in advance :)

[Nitro]

The more harddrives the better. Using one HD for 4 instances of wow will give you huge zone times.

Imo go with three drives: C for your OS/Swap file, D for 2 of your wow folders and C for 2 wow folders - 10k RPM drives if you can afford it.

If your into movie makin get a 4th drive for FRAPS writes

[Gallo]

The more harddrives the better. Using one HD for 4 instances of wow will give you huge zone times.

Imo go with three drives: C for your OS/Swap file, D for 2 of your wow folders and C for 2 wow folders - 10k RPM drives if you can afford it.

If your into movie makin get a 4th drive for FRAPS writes

Not necessarily true. When I was using 1 drives with 5 separate WoW folders, load times were baaaad. When I switched to 1 WoW Folder, load times were very quick.

In most cases, 1 good hard drive should be fine. Elitists can get 5x Raptor HDDs for WoW :)

[Shigan5]

Go with the second motherboard. You'll like it alot better than the other one. http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16813128082. Lots more expandability for hard drives and otherwise. And that video card is a beast, thothe 9600gt has the same core clock and support for the new DX10.1 and Pixel Shader 4.1. But the 9600gt consumes more power and has a slightly lower memory bandwith. Over all the debate has been that one is slightly better than the other (seen arguments for both sides on this). The thing that broke it for me was that the 9600gt is $80 cheaper.

[Anozireth]

I'm currently running a RAID 0 setup with two drives in my rig (I did this well before I multiboxed). I have 1 folder for the main and 1 folder for all the clones. The data folder for the clones is linked to the main's data folder via a symbolic link (do a search on the forums here for NTFS junction points), so it's really the same data. Having the majority of the data (aside from the UI addons) in the same place means you get a lot of cache hits when loading all 5 at the same time, so it only has to access the disk once for a lot of the data. My load times for 5 are barely more than for one.

A separate physical drive for each clone would be fastest, but who has that much room in their case.