School me on server hard drive management. (Hot swap, SATA channels, LVM, backup, etc.)

[linux guy]

I'm building a home server that will run a MythTV backend, zoneminder and a
NAS that will stream audio content to various players and images to various
viewers, including Digikam users, as well as for general data backup from
laptops, etc.

Its based on a i5 K2500 processor in a MB with an H67 6 channel SATA
interface. (4x SATA II + 2 x SATA 3)  It has 8 GB of RAM which can easily be
bumped to 16 GB.   I've added a PCI 4 channel SATA I controller as well.
Both the MB and the controller support their own flavor of software RAID.

I put all this in an Obsidian 650 case outfitted with a 4 bay trayless hot
swap cage, in addition to the single hot swap slot built into the case
itself.

I also equipped it with a dual layer BD burner.

People on the MythTV user group tell me that I need to keep the Myth
recording/playback hard drive separate from other drives on the machine so
that interruptions in disk IO from other applications don't stall the
streaming of content to the myth Front Ends or writing data from the 2 HD
PVR devices. (Max 17 Mb/sec each)

Similarly, the image files should probably also have their own drive so that
when the Digikam user pulls down 200 20 MB images in a directory s/he
doesn't stall the music streaming to other devices around the house.

I have a single 500 GB 7200 RPM drive for the OS which is F15.

In summary,
i5, 8 GB RAM
2 SATA III channels
4 SATA II channels
4 SATA I channels
4 trayless hot swap bays in a cage
1 trayless hot swap bay in the case
8 non hot swap bays
1 OS hard drive
At least 1 MythTV hard drive
At least 1 images hard drive
1 audio files hard drive
more hard drives as needed.

Questions

1) Where should I physically put each drive in the machine ?  Which hard
drives get hot swap and which don't.

2) Which drive should get which SATA channel ?

3) How does one mount the drives for the OS to access ?  I know all about
the mount command and auto mounting, etc, but how do I reference the drives
?

For example, lets say that for some reason I pull the drive that normally
occupies /dev/sdc and reboot.  The drive that was /dev/sdd will now be
/dev/sdc and thus with a "static" mount reference will mount in the wrong
mount point ?????  Is LVM supposed to handle this ?  It would be nice if I
could "label" a drive MythBackup and plug it into any one of the hot swap
bays and have it mount in the correct mountpoint to be used as anticipated
by its name.

SATA hotswap seems to complicate this ?  I've never had hot swapping devices
before, save USB drives that I manually plugged in and mounted.

4) How should I approach data backup ?  Right now I have about 250 GB of
nearly irreplaceable digital images.  RAID ?  Periodic backup to a (rotated,
stored off site) hard drive via the hot swap slot in the case ?

5) The drives, BIOS and controllers are all SMART capable.  What use would
you make of that ?

 Any and all wisdom greatly appreciated.

Thanks !
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