Lots of HDD RPMs and company suggestions, but to the point... My two cents are: ESATA. I have multi TB external disks which I have physics data stored on and needs to be analyzed. USB might be as fast (in the best case), but it uses processor overhead.
Not that a lot of machines support that kind of input. I picked up a decent laptop for cheap that also supports ESATA. I didn't do benchmarks or anything, but it's really insane IMO. ~daid PS Sorry I deleted all the reply text. I didn't want to copy/paste individual references to different company external drives and so on, just to not really care. Mine is something by Buffalo, but I care because it has ESATA. PPS Or you could be my friends using USB formated NTFS and I can use top to see how much processor power is used by ntfs-3g just to read the data. Ugh!
