Hard Disc Space...

[jb2uk]

hi, i've been using mp for a fair few months now, and since then my hard drive has slowly filled up with movies and tv series encoded with xvid (all legally of course ) my htpc is in an antec aria case which has room for 3 hard drives, i have an 80gb ide drive which my os is on (i use my pc as a pc aswell as htpc) and a 300gb sata drive with my movies on, problem is my 300gb is growing fuller and fuller and i could do with some more space, i don't want to put another drive in the case though, its waaay too hot as it is i've looked at external caddies i don't want to use usb2 as the speed of usb2 is not nearly as quick as sata and i'm loathe to spend money on a sata drive to have is held back by its connection. which leaves me three options using a sata caddy using another computer as a file server or nas/san

a sata caddy would be the best solution however i only have 3 pci slots, my tv card, my s/pdif output and i have a fan mounted in the third, i don't want to commit myself to using the third slot incase i need to use it for an expansion card in the future (eg a firewire pci card), so i cannot actually connect a caddy to my computer

another computer. i can't afford to build another computer and if i did i can't afford to run it 24/7 unfortunately this isn't an option

nas/san well... i just can't afford this option

right after all that heres my question...

have you lot any other ideas of how i can i can add a hard drive outside the case?

[nitro]

might be worth getting rid of the 80gig and buying a single large disk, say... 500gb

[GenesisFactor]

I have a similar problem with my computer. Or should i say, computers. Your problem id dlightly different so here's my recommendation:

get the USB 2.0 enclosure or a NAS enclosureand a huge ATA100-133 drive. Why? Unless you're recording at HDTV you can stream divx encoded vids as large as the ones they make when they copy movies over wifi B without a hitch. Sure there's a buffer time wait of about 5-10 seconds, but that's 5.5mbps, plus my "server" is a dinky 933Mhz gateway desktop wuth 512 RAM (it was free do you think i'd pay money for that?). My point is that your limiting factor , especially at 100-480MBps are the movies themselves. transfering the movies to the drives will be the only time you'll see the speed difference, but what's an extra two minutes. If you're using an SATA drive to solely play recordings and movies, you should have bought a 500 ATA for the same money and called it a day. As a playback storage drive to a single computer, its overkill. as a main OS drive or something, it rocks.

Plus a Nas will be a great thing to have if you ever get a laptop as it doesn't tax your HTPC when you want to pull a file off. Also, look at Hitachi's high end ATA drives as their speeds serial drives.

#8