Never used Vista so some translation may be necessary. (EDIT: I'm wondering where I got that, myself.)

However you get to Disk Management, get there.
You will see the physical disks represented graphically and in a table at the top of the sceen.
The physical disks will have partitions identified by volume label. You said you had "four drives' so I'm ass-u-ming that you have two partitions on each physical disk.
Give the partitions unique names such as "Boot", Video 0, Video 1, Video 2, etc. It doesn't matter, you could call them Earl and Ralph, if you like as long as you have a sense of which physical disk the partitions are on.
Don't clutter you boot partition with video, Do an image backup of the boot partition using GHOST 15 or Acronis True Image or any other imaging application you find reliable. Do it now before you hose anything.
Use the first partition on the non-boot physical disk as the place to put your raw video. You will edit in Vegas using that partition and render to the second partition on the other physical disk (the first partition of that disk is the boot partition). If your rendered output becomes the source files for DVD Architect, you can "Prepare" you DVD or Blu-ray images to the second parttion on the non-boot disk. The idea is to write to a different physical disk for each stage of the workflow. Your workflow will evolve.
Your mileage may vary. Use these instructions for comparison purposes only.

Hello i_c_e,
I can appreciate your excitement - I just received my new i7 machine earlier this year... and it flies...
* * *
John D mentioned Vista ... I hope you have Windows 7 64-bit on this machine... and that you are also planning to install Vegas in the 64-bit flavor as well. On my new i7 machine, the difference between 32-bit and 64-bit is 4 minutes and just over 1 minute (respectively) for the HD test someone posted a while back...
The trick is to separate the functions and storage to different hard drives... it's the tri-vecta - Vegas running from one hard drive; raw footage on another; and renders to a third hard drive...
I'm not sure how much faster it might be on separate virtual (software created partitions - four 250 GB hard drive) drives since the hard drive controller is for one physical drive... so the two physical (hardware created partitions - two 500 GB hard drives)hard drives are each on their own controller - but the two smaller virtual drives are still coming through the single hard drive controller for each physical hard drive. The controller becomes a bottle-neck sending and receiving data and messages to different virtual parts of the same physical hard drive.
If I am in error with this notion, I'm sure that someone will correct my inaccuracy.
* * *
Yes, by all means, label the hard drives with identifiers that make it easy for you to determine what's there ... Raw (for original raw footage); Vegas (where the application runs); Renders (where you store your final versions of you videos) ... or whatever you choose. John D mentioned naming one of them Earl ... I like that idea, but it may not have the same meaning for you as it does for me... (grin)
* * *

Until that time ... Earl J.

certainly win7/64bit.

i loaded both 32 & 64 vegas on my i7/920.

okay, i had a lot of 32 bit plugins (mb, newblue, etc.,) so i started out as usual - in 32.

now, a few projects later, i don't even open 32bit. i have very fast, reliable editing / rendering, and find that, with a bit of practice / trial and error, there isn't much i can't really mimic in my 32 bit plugins.

when i do need something in 32 (mercalli, for instance), i simply render the clip out in 32 with filter, and they drop it in my 64 bit edit.

In 32 bit vegas go into the internal preferences (shift-options or shift -pref i forget) and change the maximum number of rendering threads to 8 from 4. It is already set to 16 for 64 bit vegas.

When I did this my render times on the HDVrendertest were the same in 32 and 64 bit vegas (a little over 60 seconds). Otherwise in 32 bit you'll only use half your machine.

Also, somewhere there's a thread on changing various 32 bit dll's to use more than 2 GBytes, I forget what it's called but I'm sure someone else here will reply with a link (c'mon team). This greatly reduces out of memory errors when you must use the 32 bit version (which I do all of the time due to the many 32 bit plugins I have).

Here's the link

http://www.sonycreativesoftware.com/forums/ShowMessage.asp?ForumID=4&MessageID=671862

rocky

wow. Some very good info here folk. I am very grateful. I don't quite understand all of it but am figuring it out. Serious, thanks a million,
A few Qs to follow up. I have Windows 7. Love it. Sony VP is 8.1 so it's 64 bit.

1. What the foating 32bit setting? what do I want it on?

2. What do I set the Dynamic RAM Preview Max to? Right now it is at 350 but I feel it should be more.

3. I have no idea what the heck this means ", Do an image backup of the boot partition using GHOST 15 or Acronis True Image or any other imaging application you find reliable. Do it now before you hose anything. " sorry but I have never heard of any of that. feel dumb.

thanks a million sorry for the dumb Q's.

Peace,

Josh

GHOST 15 and Acronis True Image are applications that you can use to restore the system exactly to its original state, literally bit-for-bit. By using one of the applications now you can allways fall back to a previous system state should you mess something up or when some piece of hardware, like a hard drive, fails. Notice I said "when".