nsherin
In stereo nirvana...
Hopefully, more PC motherboards will include FireWire as standard - certainly the more pricier ones do at the moment. It's handy both for DV cams and also attaching high-speed external storage, although USB 2.0 is taking over on the storage side of things. Some soundcards, such as the Creative SoundBlaster Audigy / Audigy 2 cards, include a FireWire interface.
P-ATA is pretty damn fast - I'm using a Hitachi Deskstar 7K250 160GB 8MB buffer hard drive in my PC and can boot from power on to Windows XP desktop in around 25 - 30 secs. Certainly good enough for me.
Haven't tried S-ATA, as I'd need to buy an add-on card and the drives were more expensive when buying a new drive recently. The benchmarks I've seen haven't shown major benefits.
Note that this is on the PC platform using Windows XP - it may well be very different on Mac.
P-ATA is pretty damn fast - I'm using a Hitachi Deskstar 7K250 160GB 8MB buffer hard drive in my PC and can boot from power on to Windows XP desktop in around 25 - 30 secs. Certainly good enough for me.
Haven't tried S-ATA, as I'd need to buy an add-on card and the drives were more expensive when buying a new drive recently. The benchmarks I've seen haven't shown major benefits.
Note that this is on the PC platform using Windows XP - it may well be very different on Mac.