I paid forty quid for mine - 160gb - i was on a bit of a budget.

Don't know what 40 quid is in dollars :P

Yea I was short on money too, but I really wanted a 500GBs SATA2 drive.
It gives a tremendous performance boost compared to an IDE.
With a fresh install of windows, it took the SATA2 drive 9 seconds to load to desktop, whereas the IDE one (same comp, fresh install) took 16 seconds.

Wow that is a good comparison to show. I didnt measure mine because i installed the sata2 on a new build. Not the one in My PC (well not yet)

Thanks a lot guys for your help.
I still might buy a new hd but i might just buy a cheap-ish one, just big enough to hold my operating systems.

I dont really know what kindof space i`ll need so...
As an estimate whats the smallest hd thought would hold all these OSs?

Windows Vista
Windows XP
Linux - Ubuntu
Linux - FC 5 or 6

I had a bit of a look and i think 60gb will be plenty
Thats going by this
20gb for vista
5gb for xp
15gb for ubuntu
10gb for fedora

Please tell me if i`m wrong cos i dont wanna buy a hd thats no use to me

That sounds about right but i would probably go for 80gb for future updates etc.

Thank you kind sir. :-)
One final question
Will my mobo work with a ata100 hd and would i notice a difference between ata100 and ata133
thats all, thankies