I'm Gonna Do It!

[DJ-CHRIS]

The 3rd one is laggy and is a WD vanilla, and sucks no offense.

I would get a normal IDE 200Gig WD Caviar or a 200Gig Seagate.
USB isnt as fast as IDE, so you would have no peformance increase with serial

 

[See Plus Plus]

I'd be able to connect the IDE to one of my ports?

 

[Sui]

uhm ok let me explain interfaces for a bit

Sata, and Pata(IDE) are both Internal interfaces, they are not setup to go outside a case or enclosure of some type. Pata is the old tried and true 40 pin ribbon cable thats been around a very long time, Sata is a relativly a new tech, uses a 7 pin cable, and new power connector. Internal hard drives, and optical drives(cdroms) usually connect to one of these interfaces.

USB and Firewire are external interfaces, they are designed to be external.

An enclosure does 3 things, 1. it houses an Internal drive, 2. It converts the signal from an Internal interface(PATA/IDE) to an external interface(USB), 3. provides power.

Basic example of how the interfaces would be
[harddrive]----Pata----[enclosure]----USB----[laptop]

Your not going to see any differences between SATA and PATA interfaces because your bottleneck will be in the USB or firewire interface. You can save about 10 dollors by getting a PATA drive. The bad is that support for PATA is probably gonna go away in about 3 years.

 

[YanBooth]

Get a Seagate, or a Western digital, but try to avoid the cheap price temptation of Maxtor, as they a known to fail soon after the warranty runs out.
Seagate...
Seagate...
Seagate...
Seagate...
Seagate...
Seagate...
Seagate...
Seagate...
Seagate...
Seagate...

 

[See Plus Plus]

I finally understand what you are saying, thanks for the help. I will keep you updated on what I decide.

 

[uzi9mm]

You have to remember their is 8 bits for each byte.
400Mbps is really only 50megaBYTES a sec max bandwidth with optimal conditions

 

[Apokalipse]

Your not going to see any differences between SATA and PATA interfaces because your bottleneck will be in the USB or firewire interface.

actually, the bottleneck will be with the drive itself. USB 2.0 anf 1394a give more than enough bandwith for both SATA and IDE. the drive itself doesn't even use more than about 35MB/S (at 7200RPM, which is most common for 3.5" drives)