Recommendations on Upgrading Hard Drive Storage?

My computer currently has two hard drives (one 40GB and one 120GB for a
total of 160GB). And I have two optical drives, so my motherboard is
full of IDE devices (2 channels, 2 devices per channel, 4 devices total).
I'm looking to buy another hard drive in the 160GB-250GB range (depends
on whatever is cheapest per GB). I want it to be as quiet as possible
(dorm room). Depending on how things go I may be getting it a buddy
hard drive shortly thereafter.
So, should I go with IDE or SATA? Either way I'm going to have to use
an add-in PCI card. Also, which manufacturers or specific drives do you
recommend?



Just some random background info:

I was originally looking at a PCI SATA RAID card and at least 5 HDs of
size 160-200GB running in RAID5 mode, but that was too expensive for
what I need: more data storage (for movies, music, games, whatever). I
don't really need the benefits of data backup nor the increased speed.
Also, the only SATA RAID card I found on NewEgg with 8 ports had a
review saying it got ****-poor RAID5 write speeds.