Is it possible to use 2 40hdd at the same time or is it better to get a new large one?

Answer 1

It depends really on how much space you need.

If you don't think you'll need to expand beyond 80GB, then two 40GB drives will be fine. In fact, having more than one physical drive is preferred so you can move the Windows swap file over to the second drive. This speeds things up.

Also something to consider is RAID. Most newer motherboards have an onboard RAID controller that allows you to form an array of drives. You might be asking why you'd want to set something like that up. Well for starters, SPEED. You can use a RAID 0 array (striping), for example, which uses both drives at the same time. You can really speed things up going this route. The downside is that if one of your drives fails, you lose everything. So using this option requires you to make backups on a regular basis.

Of course, if you are more worried about space than you are about speed and you haven't bought any drives yet, then obviously go with the larger size (at least 120GB these days).

That's probably more detail than you wanted, but hopefully that helps....

Answer 2

In a desktop, sure. Usually you can just plug them in, but sometimes you need to set the jumpers (second drive as slave).

If you are buying a new one, get a larger drive, like 300gb as they are so cheap.

Drives have a speed rating like 5400rpm, or 7200rpm. The higher number is better.
They also have 'cache', again, a larger number like 16mb is better.

Answer 3

Yes, the above guy said it perfectly.
You can either mount the second drive and start writing to it, or reformat and install using both drives in raid 0.