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I was thinking of buying a new hard drive to store media seperately from my operating systems.
I'm just wondering what interface is best for performance, which is most popular at the moment and if anybody has any ideas about which might be most popular in a couple of years or if new interfaces will be about by then.
I'd rather keep it internal as portability is not a factor and internal is generally cheaper. I am open minded so if external is actually better i might go with that.

At the moment i have a 160gb ata133 7200

I am using this post as a guide to wether its worth buying a new ata133 hd or to wait until i need a full new pc and get a different interface.

I hope you can all give me some helpful feedback on this. :-)

Btw if this whole post sounds stupid tell me and tell me why.
Thanks guys

Hi min,

SCSI HDD's have been the fastest HDD's around for a while. They usually require an interface card, as motherboard don't come with SCSI as standard. It's rare to find SCSI HDD's in PC's, you'll normally find them in servers since you can plug in up to 16 HDD's into a single SCSI Card. SCSI HDD's are usually around 15,000 RPM.

SATA seems to be the future at the moment, with an amazing 3gb per second transfer rate, with plans to increase this in the short term to 6gb per second. Newer motherboards aleady support the 3gb speeds, but external, even SATA devices are limited to USB and Firewire speeds so you do lose out a bit with external devices. Saying that, even with the capability of transferring data at that speed, were still limited to the speed that the HDD's can actually supply that data. The fastest SATA HDD's I've seen so far is only 10,000 RPM.

My personal recommendation, is to wait until you get your new PC that has at least 3gb onboard SATA connections. You'll definately notice a difference between ATA and SATA.

You will, i have just installed a SATA2 harddrive in my system and it is a lot faster than ATA.

Hehe, I just got one too, MAJOR difference. I got a nice 500Gbs Seagate Barracude 10.1k RPMs for 130$ and 5$ S&H, works great, loving it.
It's been nomiated on NewEgg for "best hardware"

i didnt get a 500gig one nor 10k rpm!

How much you paid for it?

Here's a link to what I bought, very happy with it.

Newegg.com - Seagate Barracuda 7200.9 500GB 3.5" SATA 3.0Gb/s Hard Drive - OEM

It was on sale (40$ reduction) when I bought it.

I paid forty quid for mine - 160gb - i was on a bit of a budget.