eSATA and SATA - what is the difference?

Esata is external, sata is internal. This is probably the information that you want.

Dis is the nfo you prolly don' want... yur mobo is crap. yur NB fan will die, and you prolly won' notice, so yu need a new mobo.

OK, if your MB has lasted a good while, then all's well. You can either use the esata option, or use a usb external drive in an enclosure. Personally, I'd use the latter as it will be far more portable, but the xfer rates will be quite a bit slower. One can buy a drive pre-installed in an enclosure for either option, or get an enclosure and install the drive of their choice. Pre-installed drives come with software suites, which may / may not be useful to you.

Google is my friend, not sure about you.

Transfer rate is incredibly important to me, it is one of the reasons i am getting a new one.

If i get an internal, why would my fan overheat?

I intend on having windows and programs on one drive, and just one program (poker tracker) with a huge database on the other.

I would assume that, under this setup, only one disk would ever be working at a moment in time (I wont be doing raid or anything tricky like that)

The computer guy who set me up said he had very good cooling

My puter is 4 years old with no probs

all help much appreciated

Will getting a hdd with a lower surface temp help?

I am tossing up between a seagate barracuda 7200.11 (500gig, 32 mb cache, surface temp 42deg)

and the WD 400 gig, 16 mg cache, surf temp 51

I was leaning towards the wd (almost the same price here in australia), but am now worried about overheating. WIll this be a problem, given i have no probs over the last few years

What kind of overheating are you worried about? To give you a idea, in my main rig I have 4 HD 2 seagates 320's, WD 500, and a Samsung 750, a 3800 X2 OCed to 2.5 ghz, a OCed 7800GT, and to cool it all I have two 120mm vans in front and one in the back and I don't have a problem at all. I also multitask like ****.