FreshFrost

thank-you for your reply!

true to your advice, i did run into the one little glich that you sort of foresaw:
when restarting the laptop, i now have to keep in mind to turn the HDD on before booting up the laptop, and not the other way round. the first time i tried the whole thing, i switched the laptop on first, and the HDD immediately after, and gave the laptop a LOT of time (<-understatement) to find the HDD. even tried switching the HDD on and off again. then searching for it manually through windows explorer. in the end, i had to restart the laptop so that it could find the HDD.

moral of the story:
when you're done with your laptop = hibernate -> turn off HDD
when you're back at your laptop = turn on HDD -> wake up
how beautifully simple