Now that I'm probably too late to be of any help...
Given no Raid on your MB and your desired speed and data protection requirements I recommend the following:
Both drives on one IDE controller. This avoids any issues with a slow optical drive slowing down the HD when installed on the same channell.
Partition the first drive as follows:
Partition 1 - about 10 gigs. This is your operating system partition where you install windows, office, critical applications etc.
The small size of this partition reduces access time when windows is loading and makes for fast defragmentation and disk checks.
Partition 2 - about 50 gigs. This is for your run of the mill applications, games, mp3s, dowloads, data storage and teansient programs (tryout stuff, taxes etc.). This way the bulk of your data is unaffected if you have to reinstall windows or worse yet reformat the windows partition because of a virus or corruption.
Partition 3 - about 3-5 gigs. This is where you place your pagefile and where you store ISO images when copying CDs, DVDs, etc. The small size makes access time faster when windows is using the swap file and helps prevent buffer underruns when burning CDs/DVDs.
Make the pagefile fixed size at 150% the size of your ram. 512 ram make pagefile 768. The fixed pagefile prevent fragmentation which slows access significantly.
Use the second drive as a manually operated mirror. Once a week make an image of the first drive. For best data protection remove the image HD and store it some place safe between backups. This lets you recover any data loss catastrophy to within a week.
If you need the space on the second drive leave it installed and just image partition 1 and what you consider critical data from Partition 2.
PS Maxtor is an ok drive. Watch out for seagate