Advice sought :)

[Whoey]

Any reason why you can't ditch some of the smaller drives and just go with one large one?  Other than the fact money doesn't grow on trees.  I thought maybe you were going to say all the drives were 1tb+ or something and that is why you were running so many.  Seems like the easy solution would be to find a more suitable home for the drives and upgrade your capacity so as to not need so many drives to begin with.  But you're probably like me and make do with what you have so that's why I've got a 120gb, 160gb and 250gb even though I'd really like to dump them and get a single 1TB drive.  Nice to have redundancy for important files as well.

That reason there is the big one I'm on zero income and have only been able to get a new hdd cos of birthday money and the external drive case will be a birthday present from the parents once i make my mind up what i want 1TB drives would be great but it's not a financially viable solution at the moment!

Those HDD speeds are fine especially that 640GB, average of nearly 87mb/sec is bloody good! Don't worry about its slightly slower access time, you won't really notice it at all.

Hmm, you're right if you're running Sk754, maybe M/B is not a cheap option

In that case I would personally go with the 400 and 640 in the 2 bay and rest inside PC but thats just me and what I prefer. That DAS400 would obviously be fine, if you can get it cheaper then it wouldn't be a bad buy by any means

Yeah I was quite surprised at that transfer speed

DAS200 is £55 DAS400 is £84.......hmm i have to make up anything over £50 so financially the 200 makes so much more sense And i suppose when i get bigger drives i can still stick them in my machine. I hate making decisions!!!

so let me get this straight... you're about to spend 55-85 gbp on an external enclosure just so you can keep using 120/200/250gb drives... for that amount of money, you could just replace them with say a 640GB for 50gbp or 1TB for 60gbp (check ebuyer.com) thus negating the external needs as you should have the space/connections you need. Then wipe and throw the old ones on ebay or use them in a new machine if you have parts...

[Roadie]

so let me get this straight... you're about to spend 55-85 gbp on an external enclosure just so you can keep using 120/200/250gb drives... for that amount of money, you could just replace them with say a 640GB for 50gbp or 1TB for 60gbp (check ebuyer.com) thus negating the external needs as you should have the space/connections you need. Then wipe and throw the old ones on ebay or use them in a new machine if you have parts...

Basically yes, but one day i will need an external storage solution and i don't want a single drive enclosure. So i thought i may as well take advantage of my parents offer to spend upto £50 on me and get something that will benefit me now and in the future. And i'd rather keep the drives in use rather than have them sat around doing nothing (and not wanting to get rid of them as they will be handy in the future) and not having another pc with sata ports, having them in an external enclosure makes sense so any of my/family/friends computers can use them.

[Roadie]

As an aside, I've got Win7 installed! It's pretty nice Get 3.8 on the score thing, cpu drags me down from 4.4 on most other stuff (5.3 on hdd) not as bad as I was expecting Got some nice features and the only thing that isn't working is my old Creative Soundblaster but my mobo has onboard sound so it's not a huge issue (but slightly annoying!) That's 3 OS's installed and working, now just need to give ubuntu a go

[DaveK]

Errr... 42?

Guys, you seriously need to get out more

[Roadie]

Errr... 42?

Guys, you seriously need to get out more

No I don't.....it's been far too warm for me to be outside recently

[Whoey]

My current beast gives me 5.9 in Vista (which I think is the max score?)

I run Win7 in a Virtualmachine... so I have no idea what it would score if it had full access to my hardware...

I use Ubuntu 99% of the time anyways...

[Roadie]

Triple boot of 32 & 64 bit XP with Win7 is all hunkydory Now I might have to try ubuntu and see what happens Good job i'm living with a linux geek