ide or sata ?

I am using both at the moment. My computer has a 150 Gb EIDE hard drive which was originally fitted as the only hard drive. I have since added a pair of 160 Gb SATA hard drives. I have used the SATA drives for installing Linux distributions and running a multi boot system, but at present they are being used solely for storage.

IDE is about a year away from being discontinued in PCs. Most motherboards now only have 1 IDE slot which means you can have an IDE CD-ROM or hard drive, but not both. Just stick with SATA and keep yourself ready for the future.

For a secondary, external disk, I think the IDE makes sense. And here is the reason. It is NOT your primary C drive, which needs to be fastest. You are not going to see any speedup of bootup times with that disk even if it is SATA because it is not your primary drive. I have both 7200 RPM IDE and SATA II and SATA III drives on my computer right now. I have two external 7200 RPM IDE's and I do not see ONE SINGLE BIT OF DIFFERENCE between the actual performance of an IDE drive and the SATA drives, either SATA II or SATA III. That said, I can play games off my external drives, which are USB externals and hard disk IDE in nature, and I see no differences at all. So I think the 320 Gig drive gives you a lot more capacity, and since you are going to use it as an external drive, it doesn't make any sense to buy a smaller SATA drive that will really not prove to be any faster or more efficient. Get the bigger drive, and buy more capacity.

Well, SATA is better, its basically the upgrade of IDE I use IDE, only because my pc is a few years old... but my motherboard is new enough to have only one IDE slot ;)