external hard-disk enclosure advice?

[Miles Bader <miles@gnu.org>]

Hi, I'm looking for advice on buying a new hard-drive / external
hard-drive enclosure:

I'm currently using a rather elderly PC with a 5 GB SCSI hard-disk; it
has a (old-style) PCI bus and USB 1, but that's about it.

Given the way disk prices have fallen, I'd like to get a new bigger
disk (say 40-50 GB), but want to get something that I can easily move
to a new system when I buy one.  As I expect any new system (I'll
probably buy one within the next 1-2 years) will use different
somewhat different technologies (e.g., SATA, PCIe, etc).

This disk would be my main "personal stuff" disk, so would see heavy
use, e.g., compiling, I/O of very large image files (50-100 MB), etc.
(I mention this because some people mainly use an external drive for
low-bandwidth applications like playing back mp3 files).  I probably
won't boot off of it, so that's not an issue.

My current thinking is to get an external hard-disk enclosure,
attached via firewire, and then get a PCI firewire card for my old PC;
when I eventually upgrade, hopefully the new machine will already have
firewire.

The things I'm not really sure about though:

  1. Is firewire a reasonable choice for a "normal" disk, speed-wise?
     I've heard that USB 2 does pretty badly, chews up CPU, has many
     more compability problems than firewire etc., so USB 2 seems
     definitely the wrong way to go.

  2. At what level does the system see a firewire-attached disk?  Is
     it basically low-level, so I can partition it from debian, put my
     choice of filesystem on it, etc.?  [I've noticed some external
     drives in the store have "uses FAT32" in big letters on the
     front; I certainly don't want that (I don't care about
     windows/mac compatibility)!]

  3. Are there any common compatibility issues with Debian?  I'm
     assuming that as long as I buy a firewire controller card that
     works (there are some in the store that say "linux compatible" on
     the box, so I'm guessing that shouldn't be a problem), the
     enclosure/drive itself shouldn't be a problem.

  4. What's the best choice for the drive-enclosure interface type?  SATA?

Does anyone have any recommendations, either for a different approach
to my problem, or for specific hardware?

[Another thing that occurred to me was to simply buy an PCI SATA
controller card, but I somehow like the idea of the drive living outside
my hot PC case...]

Thanks very much,

-Miles

-- 
Quidquid latine dictum sit, altum viditur.