Only way to know which is the best is to overclock each one individually. Running it without thermal paste is a bad idea as cpus get hot pretty quick, especially the i7.
Have you updated to the latest chipset drivers? I had an issue with my ASUS drivers working with Windows 7 and would lockup for 20 secs like yours would randomly then become responsive again. I updated to newer chipset drivers and that seemed to fix the issues.
How much RAM does your system have? The thing I would worry about with the pagefile on the SSD is probably fragmentation that could occur if you let the pagefile be system managed. Maybe you could set a set limit for the pagefile size and prevent fragmentation on the SSD. Otherwise, I think the...
For RAID, you will need at least two drives for RAID 0 or RAID 1. Other RAID varieties required more drives.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RAID
Its pretty easy to setup the RAID array. All you have to do is start up the RAID utility from the motherboard after POST and select the drives that...