I’ve just recovered 2x 500 GB sata disks from an old installation, so I opened up my new Desktop and connected them to my main Linux machine, these 2 disks have been used for around 3 years on the the other installation, so I prefer to use them in a mirrored configuration, or RAID 1, so everything that is wrote on a disk is copied automatically also on the the other, and there is no loss of information if 1 of 2 disks broke up.
At the moment I use a Mint 14 XFCE edition, that is totally compatible with Ubuntu 12.10, and in my point of view for some aspects much better, so in this guide I’ll use commands that are compatible for Mint , Ubuntu and Debian, for other distributions you’ll have to search for your packages, but the configurations and commands will be the same.