I'm generally in agreement with Alfaunits suggestions, but I do have a couple of disagreements and/or elaborations to make...

1. Pagefiles on the same drive as the OS is "bunk"
I disagree. Lets say you follow what I consider to be "best practices" with hard drives - using a separate one for every "major" app (an application that itself uses enough hard drive resources to require its own) - which generally means just 1-2 other drives for desktops - then your OS disc isn't really don't a lot more than finding out where links point for you. There will be a few things, like it's probably where windows media player resides, but realistically it's heavily underutilized. The result of this is that it becomes advisable to put the page file on the same drive.

2. Pagefiles should be towards the middle of a drive...
Taking a slice out of the middle area of a drive for a pagefile (because they should have their own partitions) creates more issues than it solves on a desktop IMO. For one, it forces you to have at least 3 partitions on the drive instead of 2. It's just generally easier to put your page file at the start (physical outer edge) of the drive where it can have the best benefit in response time and be happy. The real fact of the matter is that at worst you're maybe looking at an 8GB pagefile, and 8GB on current drives is nothing in terms of loss of cylinders causing slower response to the next portion of drive.

3. In response to your question 5b, I think the answer we're looking for is "yes"... insofar as your OS will not see 2 hard drives in RAID, the OS will only see a single hard drive with a size equal to twice that of the constituent drives.

and yeah... I wish that hybrid drives were out this year too. It's stupid that we can't have even 1GB of flash memory on newer drives and instead have to wait until the drives are fully SSD.