Raid noobie partitioning questions

My brother is needing a hard drive to replace his that just died. He's needing one quick so I sold him my 250gb IDE drive. I'm wanting to clean up my case inside and with the recent cheap prices on SATA drives I'm going that route. I decided to try my hand at building my first raid setup and have a few questions. (be gentle please)

I'm wanting max speed at a cheap price so I just ordered a couple of Maxtor MaxLine III 7L250S0 250GB 7200 RPM 16MB Cache Serial ATA150 Hard Drives from the 'Egg for $105 each shipped. I'm wanting to try a Raid 0 setup and run a dual boot Windows XP Pro 64 bit/ Windows XP Pro operating systems setup. I'm thinking a three partition arrangement - one for each operating system and a third for everything else. My question is, do I just partition each hard drive the exact same? Example : Two 10 gig partitions and the rest on a partition on each of the two drives. And if I do this, will the partition sizes show up as two 20gb partitions and a third one as the remaining balance? This stuff is confusing to me since I've never messed with it before.

Edit: I have Partition Magic v8.0 if this will help.

Any help or advice would be greatly appreciated.
Robert

Can anyone [H]elp a [H]ard Brother out??

Once you have set up the striped set, the OS only sees one drive. It is in effect one drive so just format and do everything normally. You will have created one drive that is striped. No matter what you use, just divide the space by three (if you decide to go that way) and format any way you like.

As HRM said an array is seen as a single drive. My only concern with that setup would be that a disk failure would wipe out 2 OS's and all your data files. If you have no important data or a backup solution that is obviously not a problem. Otherwise you are taking a larger risk for a very narrow scoped performance increase.

dirtydr said:

As HRM said an array is seen as a single drive. My only concern with that setup would be that a disk failure would wipe out 2 OS's and all your data files. If you have no important data or a backup solution that is obviously not a problem. Otherwise you are taking a larger risk for a very narrow scoped performance increase.

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Thanks for the input guys. And yes, regular backups will be mandatory for sure after this. I am curious about the performance increase and as to whether it's worth it or not. No way to find out for sure except to just dive in.