Bodine, It should be easy to purchase a hard drive that will work with PCs and Macs. Macs can read the MS-DOS (Windows) File System, or FAT32. However, if you were to eventually move to a strictly Mac platform, if I were you I'd reformat the drive to Mac OS Extended format for slightly greater reliability. If you are going to buy a second drive for backup purposes, this conversion and attendant file copying would be easy to do. Another approach, if you know you'll be migrating to Mac, would be to use MediaFour's MacDrive 6, which lets PCs use the Mac OS file format.
Edesilva, the new Intel iMac G5 has same ports as its predecessor, including Firewire 400. Apple saves Firewire 800 for the PowerMac. There has been speculation about the future of Firewire, but I think it hasn't gone beyond speculation. USB2 is plenty good for regular folks for now, but soon enough people will "need" Firewire 800 or an equivalent.
Kennyt, it does not seem you should have to tolerate any dropout with the Airport Express. Do you have iTunes' streaming buffer size set to large? I'd look for a solution to this.
Edesilva, the new Intel iMac G5 has same ports as its predecessor, including Firewire 400. Apple saves Firewire 800 for the PowerMac. There has been speculation about the future of Firewire, but I think it hasn't gone beyond speculation. USB2 is plenty good for regular folks for now, but soon enough people will "need" Firewire 800 or an equivalent.
Kennyt, it does not seem you should have to tolerate any dropout with the Airport Express. Do you have iTunes' streaming buffer size set to large? I'd look for a solution to this.