Hi, I was planing on playing a bit with linux, and vista, but i do not want to screw up my current syste, so I was thinking about buying a new hard drive that I could just use for that purpose.

1. My question is as follows(my specs are in my sig) I know that my motherboard has a external SATA in the back to conect a hd there, and I was thinking I might maby be able to buy a hard drive that i could just plug there and use only that drive from there (without the need to open up my pc) Is this possible? What hard drives may I use for that purpose?

2. Second of all If i would like to use that hd with my other 2(IDE hd's) would just plugging it to the back allow me to use that hd with the otehr to as a temporary storage, is it hotswappable(like USB?) so I could lets say plug one in the back, transfer data there, and unplugge it?

3 Would it be pssible to use that external sata connected drive and just use it in ternally? with the other 2 IDE drives, as an internal miroring drive, or atleast as another drive(since im close to reaching my maximum capacity on the other drives.


Thank You for all the information.

While it might work, I think you're much better off running it internally. External hdd are great for storage but running OSs and programs is an entirely different issue.

The thing is that i am using 2 hard drives at present, and I do not want to tamper with the system much, just wondering what would be the answer to the above questions, especially im curious to the answers of those that have the same motherboard as I do.

especially if this motherboard will function with 2 IDE hd's and 1 SATA hard drive connected to it, sine there were issues with the motherboard9atelast when using 2 IDE hd's, and 2 optical drives(the bios did not recognize them, but they work in windows, I still have that issue...after almost a year now after I build my system)