I wouldn't have believed it, but I've manage to somehow use up all my HD space, 4x60Gb & 1x45Gb IBM, sitting on highpoint and promise controllers (DVD and CD-RW are on the mobo's IDE controller). My ideal setup was:

1st drive OS partitions
2nd drive Games (shares channel with 3rd drive)
3rd drive WAV (shares channel with 2nd drive)
4th drive Files, docs, MP3, etc
5th drive swap file and backup of OS partitions

However I've now got into MP3 in a big way (blame my purchase on the eMpeg car player), and given how often changes are made to MP3 encoding technology, I now keep archival WAV files which presently takes up 3x60Gb drives with my current CD collection. So obviously I had to jiggle things about in my setup. It looks like I'll need to buy a hard-drive or two to get it back to way I like it, and to complicate things I anticipate that I'll be getting into AV in the next few months (so I'll need to get firewire card soon). So my options are:

1) Buy a couple of 120Gb, thus staying within current IDE limitations
2) Buy a Maxtor 180Gb or 2 inc. of promise controller
3) External solution, i.e. firewire/USB2/hot-swappable
4) Something I haven't thought of

r.e.
1) Simple solution, current rig has the space/juice to do that, however without adding another controller card I would have to make certain drives share an IDE channel. I can't afford to have 3 PCI slots taken up with controller cards. Question: Can the adaptec 2400A card just be used as just a plain dumb IDE controller card controlling 4 seperate drives, or does it have to be used in a RAID setup?
2) As above I'm loathe to have to add another controller card (hmmm maybe I can replace one of mine with the new promise and live with just sharing a couple of channels amongst the least intensively accessed drives).
3) I've seen a firewire breakout box which can house either a hard-drive/DVD/CD-RW IDE unit, and it houses a psu/fan/firewire socketry. Presumably it shouldn't have a hard-drive capacity limitation. I like this solution because at least when/if the need arises you can just plonk in a larger hard-drive at a later date. However I have no experience how effective such a solution would be.
4) ...............

There just seems to be too many choices so I'm just seeking advice as to the pros/cons, plus anything I've overlooked.