Hey guys im looking to get more hard drive space and was wondering if anyone could help me with the pros and cons of getting and internal drive or an external drive and also the differences between pata and sata drives? i use my pc for audio and video apps so i need something big around 300gb-400gb.I would use the drive for playing back and recording audio and video so it needs to be as fast as possible. ive been looking at the carillon ad-1 external drive.here as far as i can tell the only advantage of external is that it is transportable, but they all seem to be more expensive. Also my current drive is partitioned into system and audio, is it possible to unpartition them into one again without reformatting the drive? as i would use my old drive as system and the new drive for audio.would this be possible?can someone reccomenda drive for me?thanks for yout time.regards will

could someone maybe suggest what t0o look for in a hard drive. cheers

As for the difference between PATA and SATA, SATA is the new technology and seems to be faster than PATA. As you probably know PATA uses the IDE bus and SATA drives use the SATA bus, so make sure you have a SATA controller if you want to get a SATA drive. As for the internal, exterance thing, I prefer internal because there is less chance of having the drive drop or fall and the read speeds are so much faster on an internal drive. Internal drives are also a bit cheaper than external. I just bought a new SATA2 drive with NCQ and i love it, even though the speeds aren't as good as i thought, but they are still better than IDE. So if i were u i would buy another internal sata drive.

-golfing22

Well I would defently recomend an internal drive unless you need it to be portable. sata is slightly faster and the cable is much slimer so it dosen't take up as much room and each drive is connected to the controler seperately. All my drives are sata and I would certenly recomend it over pata.If you have an older motherboard you will need a sata controler card.
I would like to give you links but unfortuniately I do not know of any uk computerpart sites. But I would recomend either a Segate or Western Digital Drive.

hey guys thanks for your replys.it seems that an internal drive is the one for me. Im not sure whether my motherboard is compatible though, i have a one of these could someone tell me if it would work? Also i still need to know about drive partitioning. whether it would be possible to merge two partitions into one without losing all my data? ive heard great things about programs like partition magic would this be capable of that? thanks

yeah, I love partition magic and i just looked and it can merge two partitions.

-golfing22

Sounds good then I'll check it out! Cheers Guys