HDD Configuration Advice

Hi, first time poster here so bare with me!

Am currently rebuilding my pc, its abt 6 years old now but has a (from wat i can tell) fairly gd motherboard. So i plan to "max out" the system once and for all (to the point that any further performance increase would require a new mobo!)

The mobo: Gigabyte GA-7VAXP Ultra

Upgraded the cpu to AMD Athlon XP 3000+ 333FSB
Also gonna up the ram to 3GB DDR333 (using all 3 slots, 1GB each)

And now looking at the storage. All these years been using a standard IDE HDD (1 Drive for EVERYTHING!) and yep, ive realised how stupid that was! The current support (as far as i can tell) that the mobo has is as follows:

2 x SATA connections (with optional RAID support for both of them)
4 x IDE (optional RAID support for the LAST 2 of them, IDE3 and IDE4)
mobo only supports RAID 0 and RAID 1.

So the question is, what kind of configuration should I have?

I first thought that 2 SATA HDD (of equal size) in RAID 0 would be best for performance. Then I could format the drive with OS and Personal data on seperate logical partitions.
But then shouldnt the page file also be on a seperate partition? (or rather a seperate disk altogether!) in which case, should i simply put the disk for the page file on one of the IDE connections?
And anyway, with 3GB RAM do I even need a page file? (Im an all round user, sometimes for internet and word docs, then sometimes for intense games like unreal, and for video editing and photoshop n programming etc)

And then naturally theres still the issue of data security. Ive never lost data from HDD failures, but rather, i tend to lose data simply because i feel i dont need it and so delete the data and then realise later that i DID need it! Would RAID 1 help me in this case? (As in, can i design it so that RAID 1 mirrors data to 2nd HDD automatically after 2 months or so? or does RAID 1 instantly mirror all data changes as soon as they are made?)

One possible configuration that im thinking of is having all user data on 2 SATA drives in RAID 1 configuration, then having the OS on 2 IDE drives in RAID 0 configuration and then finally having the page file on a 3rd IDE disk.

What do people think? Very sorry for the long post but I kinda need advice and seein as everyone on this forum seem to know their stuff...