Star up disk

hello, i have a mac pro 2,6 man with a 250gb start up disk, split 50/50 running mac osx and windows xp. it made some funny noises and didnt start up today, so i held my finger on the button until it restarted and it worked fine...i thought its a good time to consider a back up drive or something and i decided it was almost useless to have windows xp take up space on a drive becuase i dont use it as often as i thought i would...
my questions are...
1. i would benefit from a bigger start up disk, right? for example a 500gb.
2. how would i exactly benefit?
3. which drives do you suggest...Brands, model numbers. etc...
4. would i just throw the new drive into slot 4, use something like superduper to create a copy drive?
5. doing so, i would be able to pull out the "old start up disk" and work immediatly from the new startup drive, but with the performance benefits of a bigger drive?
6. i could then erase the old start up drive and have it as extra drive space or a possible external sata drive?
7. or even keep it as a emergeny back up incase my new drive fails? or even a drive with windows that i would be able call out from the shadows for windows only jobs?
8. is there a way to remove a hard drive icon from the desktop, i have always found it to be an eye sore to see the windows drive on my desktop...
ps- i have 2 500gb drives in slot 2 and 3 in a raid 0...i think its raid 0, they share space not backup...
mac pro 2,6   Mac OS X (10.4.10)  

well i got a seagate baracude 500 gb drive...i placed it in slot 4 of the Macpro and i set up 1 partition, Mac os extended(journaled) and clicked partition...
then the mac made a funny scratching sound for 30 minutes or so and showed no signs of really doing anything...and when i my mouse is over the disk utility window i see the little round rainbow spinning thing...is there something wrong? to me it seems like the disk is not being initialized properly...
thanks for the help,
aaron

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