About to assemble my first rig. I'll call it the TacoMiner, as a tribute.
Last question : can I use a flash drive instead of the SATA HD ? I want to start with a windows system first though, I need to study up before I can use the linux command line interface.
No, you can't use a flash drive for installing windows. You can only do that with linux.
I know this is a really old post - but yes, yes you can install windows from a flash drive, onto a flash drive - depending upon what version of the boot loader you use and if you opt to use VHDs or not etc etc.
Windows 8/server 2012 is easier to setup than windows 7 however for booting from a flash drive though, as you can just use windows 2 go.