Link Swanson wrote: this is the only question thats somewhat easy to answer: if your mobo has builtin sata ports: it's much better to get sata disks. not that this would give you any performance benefits, but i think the ide-bus will die soon, and sata hdd's are nowerdays priced approx. the same as their corresponding ide counterparts. if you need to get a pci controller: it might have a performance hit to use a pci sata controller, especially w/ some via and nvidia chipsets. peak bandwith of 32bit / 33MHz bus is 133MB/s, thats exact the same as with UDMA133. but some chipset offer even less performance on the pci bus. in this case ide hdds would be worth consdering. if you ask 100 linux user, 50 will say they use the default fs of their distro, the other 50 will argue which of the fs's is the best... there might arise a few other questions, like: how much disk size do you need ? is performance/reliabilty/noise level of interest ? if yes, what is the most important ?