My original plan was to set up the Raptors in Raid0 for my boot disk, games and other non-critical data that can be replaced or re-installed.
The 500G disks would be raid1 for storing important data like music, digital photos, home videos etc...

Parts for the new build are in transit and I have a few questions...

Does the Intel Matrix allow you to stripe raid1 (0+1) with 2 disks?
edit: Looks like it does do load balancing for increased read performance.

Is there a limit to the number of logical disks I can create?
I guess there's a limit of two logical drives per physical drive but not an overall limit like there is on some oem raid controllers.

I'm considering 3 logical drives on 4 physical disks.
Ideally I would create a smaller 20-60G raid0 at the front of the raptors for maximum seek+transfer rates on the boot drive and then another raid0 on the remainder for video editing and other large transient files.
The 500G raid1 would be one large drive.

Any critiques or suggestions are welcome.
Everyone seems to have suggestions for stripe sizes so go ahead, especially if you know of any benchmarks on ICH7/8/9 with WindowsXP boot partition.

I know Matrix allows you to mix & match different drives or parts of drives in different raid configs so maybe there's a better config that I haven't considered.

Keep in mind I'd rather install Windows once. I don't have the time or patience to re-install windows multiple times to try different configs.