Efficient hard drive utilization?

[OmniVector]

Hi fellow gentoo users.
I've been running gentoo for about a year now, and decided I'd give me dated hard drive layout an overhall. I know I could setup my system a hell of a lot more efficient than the way it currently is.
A the moment I have 4 hard drives:
hdh - 20gb - storage
hdg - 45gb - storage
hde - 60gb - storage
hda - 80gb - root
hdc - 80gb - backup

as you can see, my 80gb is nothing but a big fat 80gb root partition, which as I know now more than i did when i first installed linux, that it was a bad idea.

i have managed to get my partitions this big after one year of usage:
518M ./tmp
452M ./var
4.2G ./usr
36M ./etc
11M ./lib
4.0M ./sbin
1.1G ./opt
3.1M ./boot
5.5M ./bin

hda and hde each have their own dedicated channel. hdg and hdh however do not. i'm thinking of moving my 80 gb backup disk to hdh, and my 20gb hdh disk to hdc's position so i get more disks on dedicated channels. it's not a big deal if the backup disk shares a channel with another disk since it's idle and spun down with noflushd most of the time.

if you had 20, 45, 60, and 80 gb disks with 1gb of ram how would you lay it out? Here's what i'm thinking, and i'm not sure if this is the best choice so please let me know if any of this would generate problems:
swap - 2gb, 512mb per disk
/tmp - 1gb on 60gb disk, 1gb on 45gb disk split by raid0
/var - 1gb on 20gb disk, 1gb on 80gb disk split by raid0
/usr - 10gb on 80gb disk
/home - 10gb on 60gb disk, 10gb on 80gb disk split by raid0
/etc, /lib, /sbin, /boot, /opt, /bin all on remander of 80gb disk

what do ya guys think? thanks for any suggestions!
_________________
-Tristan

[gojuka]

Keep it simple. Root, swap, /var and /home ... well, and a separate /boot is an idea I've come to like too.

Use tmpfs for /tmp.

Consider using lvm so you can size/resize as you please.

Mark
_________________
we're outta control