1. Leave them as Basic.  Dynamic offers nothing that will help you acheive faster speeds.  Dynamic is required for Windows-managed RAID (you should NOT run this on top of hardware RAID, unless you know what you are doing), more than four primary partitions per disk, and for concatenating non-contiguous disk space into a volume.  These should be used with care, and disks should remain Basic except if specific functionality is needed, as Dynamic disks can cause other headaches down the road (many recovery tools and utilities do not work on Dynamic disks, so if you ever have a problem with the OS, chances are you are looking at reinstalling and restoring files from backup). 2. To do this, you must partition Windows such that your partition lies on the outer edge of the disk.  In most cases, you can simply start with a partition just large enough to hold your Windows installation, then expand it later.  This will ensure that the OS files are written only to the fastest locations.  This cannot be done at the RAID level.  You could create a smaller array across the disks, but there is then no way to expand it to be any larger - you would have to create two RAID 0's across the disks, which would show up as two separate disks in the OS.
Thanks for the help on this. Setting up a Dell 2950 running Windows XP Pro SP3. Perc5i raid controller installed and working fine. This machine will be for capturing uncompressed video so maximizing my hard drive speed is my goal as opposed to long term data storage. Once captured the files will be moved off to a single USB drive. So my questions are: 1) I plan to have three firmware-matched 72gb SAS drives set up as Raid 0. Would these be best set for basic or dynamic and why, please? 2) Am I correct in my understanding that the outer half of a drive is faster than the inner most portion? If so is there a way to partition these three drives as Raid 0 to use the outer most portion of the drive and how would I accomplish that? Thanks : )  
Two questions on using Raid 0