Originally posted by Curtis@Aug 10, 2003 @ 01:49 AM
I'm thinking about painting the remaining beige bits silver, but I'm also thinking that's too much like hard work. I'm not quite sure how to finish of the front - should I go with a perspex window, or just put the drivebay covers back on?
Paint the bay covers, or maybe dont, and put them back on. Unless you plan on doing something to make the view nice from that angle, which with cables dangling can be hard to do. Maybe if you were relying on UV light instead of visible light, you could use UV-reactive cables.
As for SATA vs parallel ATA, there isn't a ton of difference. It allows for a higher max transfer, but most drives can't even reach sustained speeds of 100MB/sec yet. If you're looking for speed, a Raptor 36GB 10K SATA drive might fit the bill, unless you want to go for a RAID solution. For storage, it doesn't matter what the interface is, one advantage of SATA is that each cable is master, no slave to share with. Around $100 gets a 120GB 7.2K UATA drive. About $20 more gets you an equivalent 120GB SATA drive, so it isnt worth it unless you plan on using your parallel ATA connectors up with something else. Maybe you could do both, get a fast Raptor drive and a large, slower UATA drive for storage. Or once again, just build a RAID array, I don't know if your board supports RAID and for what connection, or if you'd have to buy a RAID card. Its all up to you and how much you want to spend.