Since you want cheap, high performance and flexible storage you could also consider buying a SATA or SAS controller. Then you can use either SATA or SAS disks with higher performance than you can get from either USB or Firewire. I have 3 SATA controllers in my old AMD Athlon server (a repurposed desktop) at the moment, but I will try one of those soon in my Sun E250 server to see if and how well it works (on Slackware 12.0 SPARC). Sunil