[gentoo-user] OT: System redesign

[MAL]

My setup as it stands:

Ob-board IDE controller:
hda: 8GB HDD
        c:\ (WinXP)
hdb: none
hdc: CD-RW
hdd: DVD-RW
On-board Promise IDE ('raid') controller:
hde: 42GB HDD
        /boot (Gentoo)
        /     (Gentoo)
hdf: none
hdg: none
hdh: none
The machine is an Athlon XP 1700+, 512MB RAM, and basically I'm tired of the 
limited performance.  My next upgrade step will be a dual CPU motherboard 
(Athlon-MP, AMD-64, who knows), but for now I decided the disk was a bottleneck.
I'm on a pretty limited budget, so after deciding serial-ata was too pricey 
(I'd need a controller card), for the performance gain, I decided on buying 
2x Western Digital JB (120GB, 8MB cache), as i've already used these drives 
and can vouch for their performance.

The idea is to RAID-0 them, LVM/EVMS that, and partition on top.
I can wipe and reuse the 42GB and 8GB disks and move them around, but I need 
WinXP (preferably with more space than 8GB - blame the games :)

I'm really just asking if anyone has any recommendations for partition 
layout, what filesystems on what partitions, and what general structure 
would be fastest?

Would swap benefit from being on another disk?

Does fragmentation play a part over time?

What block size for the RAID-0 array?

Cheers for any help!
MAL
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