With the impending research I decided to upgrade one of my older machine to have some decent storage capacity. Older means a P750 Pentium III circa 2000(?) with a standard for the time EIDE hard drive interface. While you can still buy IDE drives they are quite limited and more expensive per Gb of storage than the newer SATA drives. However, and no surprises here, the newer technology won’t plug into the older one so if you want a modern large capacity cheap drive your in trouble. However you can buy an adapter that will allow the connection. I used a StarTech IDE2SAT25 from http://dabs.com to connect a new SATA 500Gb drive into the machine. The only glitches were realising I needed a SATA power cable - and yes they are a different connector from the older ones - requiring a quick trip to maplins to get a converter (part A12AZ) and realising I needed to force the SATA drive to slow down to SATA I (150Gb/s) by setting a jumper pin otherwise the machines bios failed to see the new drive. So while I can get a larger drive attached I can’t make use of it’s faster speeds, the older motherboard simply won’t do it. As I write this the machine is happily formatting the new drive so I don’t have to squeeze my research datasets onto a 20Gb hard drive. Bliss.