[Daniel Lord]

I am chiming in a bit late here but there are options for external eSata as well. I have a first-gen dual four-core (total 8 cores) 3.0 GHz system and I use a Sonnet Tempo eSata card to provide 4 external eSata ports. I have two RDI arays on two of the ports right now (one mirror for backup and one striped array for speed) and they work fine So if you use one of those cards, you should be able to plug in a Sata External drive and have better throughput than with an internal IDE and not have to give up a drive bay connection.