Best portable storage solution?

[RISCutils]

Thanks in advance for all the advice.

I need to buy some sort of portable storage device to connect to as wide a variety of PC's (and possibly mac's) as possible.
Probably has to have USB of some sort as a minimum.
Bearing in mind that Most PC's that have Firewire probably also have USB of some form, so Firewire is probably less of a priority than say the old 'Paralel (printer) Port' for connecting to older machines without USB or Firewire.

Needs in order of priority:

1. Number of connection methods - direct IDE/ATAPI, Paralel, USB 1, USB 2, Firewire
2. Transfer Speed
3. Storage Space - Preferably 40Gb plus
4. Cost

Thanks for the suggestions.

 

[zephyrprime]

Well, it's easy to buy a external drive that supports USB and firewire but there aren't many (any?) drives that support parallel anymore. There aren't any drives that support external IDE although there are some that support a scsi to ide bridge. Maybe you could get two external cage. 1 for usb/firewire and 1 for parallel. Then you would swap as needed.

 

[0rion]

I do know that pen drives is not the way to go if you wont 40Gb. Depending were you go, but in tiger direct a usb 2.0 2Gb pin drive for 1099.99$. On the other hand thay have regular size external 40Gb for 160$ there are probley better at price graber.

 

[BZ]

kanguru makes external drives with multiple interfaces including USB, firewire and parallel.

http://www.kanguru.com/kdisk.html
It looks like you need to buy one adapter and cables for each interface extra.