What interface to choose for a new hard drive

[Trueliar]

I'm buying a 500 GB drive and want it to be a good investment that will
last a good time. My PC supports USB 2, Firewire 400, SATA 150, and
the regular EIDE. All my current drives are EIDE. But wonder if EIDE
is on its way out.

If I go for USB or Firewire, while it's good for back up and
convenience, is it somewhat slower than the internal drives?

 

[Conor]

I'm buying a 500 GB drive and want it to be a good investment that will
last a good time. My PC supports USB 2, Firewire 400, SATA 150, and
the regular EIDE. All my current drives are EIDE. But wonder if EIDE
is on its way out.

If I go for USB or Firewire, while it's good for back up and
convenience, is it somewhat slower than the internal drives?

How long are firewire and USB going to be around? Remember IDE has been
around for the thick end of a decade and a half so it's not going
anywhere soon.

Go for SATA2 if you want some futureproofing.

 

[Agent_C]

If I go for USB or Firewire, while it's good for back up and
convenience, is it somewhat slower than the internal drives?

Not somewhat; much slower than a SATA or IDE drive connected directly
to the motherboard.

A_C

 

[Rod Speed]

I'm buying a 500 GB drive and want it to be a good investment
that will last a good time. My PC supports USB 2, Firewire 400,
SATA 150, and the regular EIDE. All my current drives are EIDE.
But wonder if EIDE is on its way out.

Yes, there are already some motherboards that only have a
single EIDE controller, so you could have a problem when you
want to migrate the drives to a new motherboard, because
you would normally want at least one EIDE optical drive.

If you get a SATA 500G drives, you have rather
less constraints on what you can buy in the future.

If I go for USB or Firewire, while it's good for back up and
convenience, is it somewhat slower than the internal drives?

Yes. And there are other downsides too, like not
being able to see the SMART data for the drive
so you cant even monitor the drive temperature etc.

eSATA is much better in that regard if you ever do want to have
that 500G drive in an external housing for whatever reason.

 

[DaveW]

SATA is the wave of the future. Until the new "hybrid" drives come out next
year, that is.