Partitioning before install of Windows 7

[alfawolf04]

I am planning a computer build to purchase after the holiday season and my plan is this so far: I want to RAID 0 two hard drives (of sizes I have yet to finalize) and partition off the outer 20% of each drive for use of windows, startup apps, and other major applications (mostly games). The rest will be used for downloads and other data storage not requiring quick read/write speeds.

Here's my question: After RAIDing the hard drives, how do I partition off the outer parts of the drives before installing Windows 7? I imagine that creating the partition is the easy part, I'm just not sure how one can tell what part of the drive the given partition is on.

 

[TheViper]

Partition the drives first with a good partition editor such as a Linux Live CD. Then build the RAID arrays.

 

[pathasse]

Doesnt your OS automatically go to the outer part of the HDD?