Morning all!
himjim - a USB drive should be fine attached to a server streaming things across the network, provided it's 7200rpm USB 2.0 (or preferably Firewire, as this is faster in real world situations)...

PATA (IDE) should also be fine, but I'd stick to larger numbers of smaller drives as Dok says. I've never seen a PATA drive larger than 500GB either.

You can get PCI SATA cards for about 15 quid though, which should also allow you to do RAID and such. Probably the best option, SATA drives are pretty cheap these days.

Or you could go for one of the four drive Buffalo NAS, they're pretty decent, although more expensive than rolling your own, particularly if you've already got a computer. It won't need to be very fast or anything.

I've got plans for a RAID server but need the funds to do it :(

(across various drives I have about 7TB of data, you lot are amateurs :P)

My new test bed machine has arrived today, so I'm playing with Windows 7 all day. Beats working!
(Son of Sam-i-am We're all as mad as hatters here, Fri 16 Jan 2009, 11:06, Reply)