Could anyone please give me some advice please. I am thinking of buying this External Sata HDD on ebay item number 250054303544. See Here :- http://cgi.ebay.co.uk/400GB-Portabl... I currently have a Gigabyte GA-7N400pro motherboard and use just one 160GB SATA Hard drive. To get this external SATA HDD to work do I have to also purchase the SATA to eSata Bracket SATA to eSATA Bracket (ebay item number 250054196803 ) http://cgi.ebay.co.uk/Internal-SATA... I hope that the above makes sense and would be grateful for any advice TIA

You do not need the SATA bracket since the SATA drive is USB 2.0 ready.You need to plug it in a USB port.

You don't need the bracket if you get the USB connected external enclosure and drive - that is for connecting just a SATA hard drive directly. You can use the bracket and just a bare SATA drive connected by its cable to the bracket port, or a drive in some sort of simple box. ..... There may be a problem you will run into. Your Gigabyte GA-7N400 pro mboard has SATA support built in, but not SATA-2 (a.k.a. SATA-II or SATAII or SATA-e or SATAe) support. This applies for a directly connected to the mboard SATA drive controller drive, and if you use the bracket adapter to connect to the onboard SATA drive controller header - I assume it also applies for a USB or firewire connected drive in an external enclosure: For a mboard that has SATA support but not SATA-2 support, some mboard chipsets will recognize a SATA-2 hard drive as a SATA drive, and run it up to a max 150 mbps data transfer rate rather than the up to the max 300 mbps data transfer rate the drive is capable of, but other mboard chipsets will not see a SATA-2 drive at all. If the drive has jumper pins on which a jumper can be installed to limit it to SATA mode, if a jumper is installed on those pins, a mboard chipset that cannot see a SATA-2 drive will then be able to see the drive as a SATA drive. Some hard drives have the necessary pins (e.g. some Samsung), some don't (e.g. some Maxtor).

You do not need the SATA bracket since the SATA drive is USB 2.0 ready.You need to plug it in a USB port That is true but it will not enable you to take advantage of eSata external HD proven ability to moves data up to five times faster than USB 2.0 or Firewire external hard drives. For more info read this article. i_XpUser

Thanks for your assistance and help