[macintologist]

Ok so I'm thinking about buying an internal hard drive and sticking it in a USB or Firewire enclosure. What kind of hard drive do I need to buy, SATA? ATA 100, 133? This sort of info isn't straight forward when trying to do a search for it. Thanks in advanced!

-Macintologist

[mduell]

The one that matches the drive you're going to buy.
ATA (also known as IDE) and SATA are both much faster than USB or Firewire, so it's just a question of cost, not performance. Generally enclosures for IDE drives are much cheaper and easier to find, but generally SATA drives are cheaper.

If you tell me what external connections and capacity (or price) you want, I'll give you some links to compatible products.

[macintologist]

It's just going to be a big storage drive, performance is not important. I'm a little hestitant on USB 2 not because it's slower than FW but because I'm afraid of the reliability. This is a hard drive that people will be constantly accessing over a network and I've used rock-solid firewire drives for years, but I do understand how much cheaper USB 2 is.

I went on newegg again and what you said made sense. You chose the "internal interface" which could be IDE or SATA and get a hard drive that matches it. Then you select the external interface which could be USB, fw, esata, whatever.

Thanks for the tip.