SATA RAID 0 setup - Partitions?

[airfoil]

I'm implementing RAID for the first time ever, using 2 Hitachi 7K250 120 GB SATA drives. I'm not much of a game freak and expect to use the PC to burn DVDs of my attempts at home video.

Other pertinent hardware:
ASUS P4P800 deluxe
Maxtor 7200 RPM 40 GB - IDE Primary Master
PX708A - IDE Secondary Master
LiteOn Combo LTC 4816 - IDE Secondary Slave
VIA 6410 onboard IDE RAID - not used so far

Questions about what would give me best performance:

1. Do I run the OS from the IDE drive and use the SATA RAID as the storage area and for the paging file?
2. What size stripe size is optimum? I'm confused between 64/128 kb.
3. While I am interested in reducing boot times, I'm also looking at faster I/O performance overall. Will my leaving the IDE drive as the boot drive help me see a noticeable performance gain? Or do I put the OS on the RAID itself?
4. Does anyone know if I can run optical drives off the onboard VIA 6410 controller? I've read the mobo manual and haven't found a reference to this.
5. How do you suggest I partition the RAID drives? I'll mostly be using them for storage, with about 20 GB as 'scratch' space.

Thanks!

 

[Zelmo3]

I think my setup is opposite of what you're suggesting. I have my OS and all my programs on the RAID, and storage and page file on IDE. I figured this was best for me because it puts the most-accessed stuff on RAID.
I don't know what stripe size is optimum; my Promise controller set the size at 64kB when I told it I'm using a desktop computer. The other options were fileserver and video editing, and I think they use smaller stripes.

 

[airfoil]

Okay, I have the system setup with XP installed on the RAID array.

Can someone please let me know what they believe the best way to partition a 230 GB RAID0 array? The way I have it setup at this time is 35 GB for the XP partition on C:\ and 199 GB on D:\

Will partitioning further have an obvious negative impact on perfromance?