dual hard drives

Well even as raid it will use the whole 450gig it will simply show as 1 drive, but theres no reason that you can't use them as 2 separate drives.

You can just hook it up as a slave. You will then have two hard drives.

I'm a little unsure how.....

I don't like the idea of a RAID setup cause I don't want mirroring or striping (perhaps there's other kinds-I only know of those). I just want to be able to have a boatload of storage space.

Sounds good, but I'm not sure how to set up a slave with SATA. I guess since I'm a bit lacking in tech knowledge I need a better explanation. If it helps here is a pic of my motherboard. You could just tell me what ports to use.

The master-slave relationships I'm used to (or I know about-at least a little) is only IDE, so I guess I need a little more.

Thanks

Jeff

I forgot to mention...Not sure if my system specs matter, but if so the ones under my profile pic were wrong-my mobo changed. They are correct now.

I don't know a lot about raid either, but I can tell you if it's set up as a striped raid0 array it will show as 1 450gig drive, the risk is if either drive fails you lose it all, so it's not for everyone, for those they go for raid0 + 1 array, this gives them automatic duplication of their main drive, BUT it requires ALL the drives to be the same, the same as raid0 does thinking about it, so even if you wanted to you probably couldn't.
As to slave, Sata doesn't use jumpers, so my only guess is just plug it in and make sure your boot drive doesn't change in the bios, worst case it just wont start, but as each Sata drive has it's own cable\plug then it doesn't need to be told whether it's master or slave, just so long as the Sata drivers are installed it should be fine, I will be going the same way when I get more money and it's how I figured I'd plug mine in, see how that goes, should be OK I'd of thought

With SATA, there is actually no master/slave configurations, you just plug in the drive, make sure the BIOS detects it, and format it if necessary.