External hard disk drive?

[abc123kes]

First of all, hello everyone!

I have a Dell XPS laptop and use an 80 GB external hard drive for storage. I actually found a site that has the drive which can be found here:
Toshiba (MK8032GAX) 80 GB IDE Hard Drive Product Reviews and Price Comparison - Epinions.com

But I am running out of space and was thinking of buying a new drive, say at least 250 GB.

I checked with the local computer store and they had 320GB for CAD 72.00, which I found quite reasonable.

The only thing is I am not sure if I should get SATA or IDE, which the guy at the store asked me and I had no idea what the difference was. I think the one I have right now is IDE (it says on the site I posted above) but I don't know much more than that.

My main concern is speed, as I will be using the new one to store movies and it would be better if I could just watch the movies straight from the drive rather than having to copy it onto the pc because the speed is too slow.

Also, as I have a laptop, it would have to connect via a USB port, so I would need an enclosure (or hard drive box), which I am aware of!

So any advice on would be much appreciated

 

[Jk]

Don't you already have an enclosure if you are using that hard drive as an external? If that is the case I would buy the 320 IDE and use the enclosure you already have.

If you don't have an enclosure for some reason, you might as well go with a new SATA enclosure and hard drive. I think SATA and IDE are both bottlenecked by usb so it might not matter speed-wise which one you go with.

 

[Szat]

Have you checked out Newegg? You'll be able to find anything you're looking for there at great prices with customer reviews as well. That's the only place where I buy PC components and almost everyone here buys from Newegg.