@MTG : the settings that put me off was that for the Sata hdd's to work as hot swappable, AHCI has to be enabled in the BIOS which then requires the use of a floppy or slipstreaming of SB700 sata drivers into the Windows XP installation.
Even this was fine but after i enabled AHCI the hdd's appear as SCSI disks and i cant monitor the temperatures of the hard disk...
And about the price...it remains the same.