Streaming resource loading / Multithreading

Hello, I'm glad the forum is back to life :) Before I start designing sth, I'd like to request advices on the subject of streaming resource loading during a game. Here is the -common I think- design I've thought of (with pieces borrowed here and there as some people may notice) I plan to have a resource loader which runs on it own thread. That thread would be sleeping until one sends him a request to load some file. That request would have the form of stacking a resource identifier (most likely an integer) on the resource manager "loading command stack". It would go back to sleep when it's stack is empty, and also, it would know how to resolve to the real data file that the ID refers to. Since I dont want the caller to wait for the resource to be loaded (that could take a couple of seconds, even more), I thought that I could use an asynchronous pattern. What I plan to do is pass a pointer to an Interface along with the resource identifier. Somthing like:

void ResourceManager::LoadResource(UINT _uiResID, ResourceBase* _pCaller);

class ResourceBase
{
    virtual void SendMessage(int _msg);
}     

Calling this method would have the effect of waking up the loader thread and have it load the resource and fill appropriate fields of _pCaller in a thread safe fashion. When loading is complete, the thread would call:

_pCaller->SendResource(RESOURCE_READY);

to notify it that it can start using its resource. So what is your opinion about this first point ? Second point: I want to ensure that loading the resource is "load balanced". What I mean is that there is no point is having a separate thread loading a resource if that thread holds CPU monitoring (assuming I'm running on a single core) during all the loading process. So lets say I'd use the antique yet powerful fread() to read the data within some big file (like 20 MB) Is there any chance that a call like

fread(pData, 20 * 1024 * 1024, 1, pFile);

would yield the cpu's attention to another process ? If no, then it is pointless. And would that code be better (less efficient, but pure speed doesnt matter I just want it to be treated in harmony with the other threads:

for(int iChunk = 0 ; iChunk < iNbChunkInFile ; iChunk++)
{
    fread(&pData[iChunk*sizeOfChunk], sizeOfChunk, 1, pFile);
}

Or do you have any better suggestion ? As you can see I'm no expert of multithreading, yet I believe that it is the future and I want to learn :) Thanks for your reading ! Regards, Janta