T60p ultrabay drive for linux

Does anyone have some advice on using a 15.4" T60p's ultrabay drive? I would like to get a 160/250 GB drive and partition it so that i can have a linux system, as well as some extra room for windows xp.

1- Would i be able make two partitions on it, put linux on one AND boot from it, and use the other one for winxp?

2- How about heat/noise issues? There was a post complaining of vibration and heat coming from a 100GB 7200rpm drive that was kind of annoying.

3- Any advice on what drive to buy, hitach, seagate, WD?(for the drive bay, i assume the only choice is the lenovo drive bay)

Thanks

 

Since I do not have one (and neither do I know anyone who has), I assume that:

1. There should not be any problems. The computer should consider it like a HDD

2. This is a matter of how sensitive you are about the noise. It is well known that 7k2 RPM drives get pretty warm, but I think that you will hear the fan more than the drive.

3. Hitachi disks seem to be faster than the average disk

Maybe you want to consider to buy a small portable USB-disk and change the disk to something faster than the usual 5k4 RPM drive? I bought a cheaop WESTERN DIGITAL PASSPORT II 80GB 2.5" external USB drive and replaced the original disk with a HITACHI TRAVELSTAR E7K100 100GB 2.5" 7200RPM ATA100. Now, this thing is FAST! I run some virtual machines from the external USB drive now, and they actually run faster thou they need to go through the USB interface and execute the code. It sounds strange that it would be even faster than the local disk that is attached to the SATA interface which even uses NCQ technology to improve the performance, but the damn USB disk is faster for some reason!