triple booting xp 7 linux

I am thinking about setting up a triple boot system. I have seen different ways of doing it and was wondering if there was a "best" way. Most tutorials say install xp first to it's own partition then 7 and finally linux. Linux will detect all the OS's and give you a boot menu. I have also seen a tutorial that said to partition with linux install xp and then hide it from 7 and install 7 then install linux last to it's own partition. I was also considering two hard drives. One for XP/7 and one for linux.

If you have a pretty decent machine you might want to consider just Win 7 .... And create two Virtual Machines for the other software and more if you want or need them.

This is my new computer. It will be running an FX8350 with 16gigs of ram and crossfired 7970's. I have 3 hard drives a 1TB WD black, a 2 TB Hitachi drive and a 750 GB WD black. Those are the drives I have on hand. The Windows installs are basically so I can game. I do a lot of transcoding which will be done with Linux. I also want to use Linux more so I can learn it better. Have not decided if i am going to use Mint or Ubuntu yet. I had a lot of problems getting my sound to work under Mint but that was 13 I think. Maybe it is easier under the lastest distro. I'm leaning toward Ubuntu though I like the Cinnamon desktop.