Hard drive/Mass storage

Following Sachin’s lead, I’ll ask my minute audience for their decision. I’m trying to decide what I should get, a cheap large internal or external hard drive. I’ll share details below:I have a large collection of data that I primarily access on my laptop, movie clips and such. I have another machine in my living room which I use as a web development server and sometimes as a Media player that outputs to my mini stereo.

Right now the big dilema is the server is a PII 300 with Ultra Wide SCSI drives ONLY. The drives are noisy, but the machine is still usable.

I could remove a drive and reduce the noise by a great deal and run most things of the SCSI drive and use the ATA as a storage drive.

The alternative is using a Firewire disk. With a firewire disk, I’d need a firewire adaptor, but I could also connect it directly to my laptop.

That offers a degree of portability, but I’m still a bit uncertain. I can always network the drives from one computer to the next and just risk the loss due to network speed.

As for internal drives I’m at a loss between ATA and SATA. The prices for both are close. SATA is cheaper than an external drive, but is very fast. I’d have to get special adaptors, so it may not be worth it.

I’d like to have something in mind in the next week. Maybe I’ll talk to folks at MicroCenter. I’m leaning toward the large ATA, possibly a 180GXP 180GB from IBM for $160 or so…