I've currently got IDE drives in my PC. It;s time to upgrade my drives to something a bit bigger, and I'm considering doing the SCSI thing. I'm thinking about buying a SCSI controller card, and ditching both my IDE hard drives and buying a decent size SCSI drive.

Questions:

What should I look for in a SCSI card? Wide? Ultrawide? Number of ports? I don't really know much about these things, but I'd like to get something that will be relatively future proof (as long as it's not totally obselete within 6 months that would be cool).

What sort of stuff do I need to know about SCSI hard drives? What is a decent/good speed (10k, 15k etc)? Do they come in different data transfer speeds or is this dependant on wide/ultrawide etc? Do I need to worry about caches etc?

Finally (for the moment at least) I will probably have to keep my IDE CD-RW and DVDROM drives as I can't afford to upgrade everything at once. Bearing this in mind, am I actually going to notice any benefits by upgrading only HDDs or will the system be held back by the IDE components? e.g. is it better to wait until I can do the whole lot in one go?

I'm a total newbie to SCSI - all I've got is the general impression that they are faster than IDE so I'm looking to speed up my OS a bit (Win2ksp2 on P4 1.4GHz, 512MB Rambus).

Any advice appreciated

Cheers,
Dan.