Gigabyte SATA confusion

[FSH42NA]

I'm in the process of putting together the following:

Gigabyte P35 DS4
Quad 6600
Tuniq tower 120
2x1gb Gskill PC6400
EVGA 8800 GTS 640 mb
Samsung 183L/ Samsung 203B SATA burners
Samsung 500gb SATA HD x 2
Seagate 500gb SATA HD x 2
onboard sound
Gigabyte Aurora 570 full tower case
Corsair 620 power supply
XP Pro sp2

The mobo has 6 SATA ports run by the Southbridge ICH9R and 2 SATA ports by the Gigabyte (Jmicron) chip (?).

I don't plan on running raid; I just want to lots of SATA storage along with SATA dvd burners. I would also like to hook up the SATA bracket that'll allow me to use an External Seagate hard drive that is Esata capable.

the 2 different SATA ports have me confused. Will the orange ICH9R ports and the purple Jmicron ports both allow use of SATA drives (non-raid) or SATA burners? Are the Jmicron ports only for raid? Do I need to create a driver disk to use at the "F6" step of installing my OS XP pro sp2? Is "hot swapping" capability with Esata only available with Vista (thought I read that somewhere)?


Sorry for the lame ass questions

 

[FSH42NA]

bump

 

[boglwe]

YES, NO, NO, I don't know. respectively

As fr the onboard Sata. I have interchanged several different drives on several different ports and it all works..... ALTHOUGH...... i am speaking from a Vista 64 perspective now that I think about it.

the bottom line is, You should be able to do all that you want to do (regarding the subtitle of your post).