1 Billion Row Table (Loan Performance)

I will be receiving data from a company called Loan Performance, that has one file/table that will hold 1 billion rows. They send data by period, and I plan to load the data via BCP via NT/DOS scripts. The 1 billion rows represents data for 200+ periods.

Are the following design plans feasible

1. Partition table by period value, I'm not sure of the max number of partitions per table in 2005, but I think we have periods data back to 1992 and a new one gets created every month, so the possibility of having > 1000 partitions exists. I plan on just pre-creating partitions for future data, instead of dynamically creating when a new period is sent.

2. Load data via BCP in DOS shell scripts that will drop index (by partition), BCP in data, and they re-create indexes by partition, is this possible ? and will I see a performance increase as opposed to one huge table (I'm pretty much sure I will). There is usually one periods data present per day, but sometimes the vendor resends all data (would get loaded on weekend).

I'm a bit unsure of where to start being I never worked with this amount of data. I worked with partitioning in Oracle a long time ago.

I plan on having an 2XQuadCore 2.66Ghz CPU with 32GB of RAM and SQL2005EE 64Bit connected to 1 Terabyte SAN Disk.

Thanks all,
PMA