The diameter of the pulleys in a pulley system have absolutely no effect on the reduction of that system. Also, you do NOT want to use drawer slides. They have to much friction, don't extend far enough, and aren't nearly strong enough. I'll have a couple cad sketches up of systems of bearings and cascades in a bit (once I get done with a work issue..)
Edited to add:
That's a picture of the 254/968 setup from a while back (the blue tube in the picture below). It works well if you want only 1 stage. If you want multiple stages (per the PDF) you can make rectangular frames, then use C-channel with some bearings in them at the tops and bottoms of each frame to guide them.
In '08 we used IGUS slides to do it. It worked remarkably well, however the slides were certainly not meant for that application and we had to do pretty regular maintenance on them. Video of that robot here:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jOJmiPAcZt4
In addition, many hi-lo setups have counterweights to counteract the weight of each stage. That year, we used bungie cord and pulleys so that each stage effectly weighed "nothing" - in fact the motor had to keep the stages down because we decided to also counteract some of the weight of the ball.