Since I've nearly ran out of space on the HDD's of my home computer (80 + 120 + 250 GB, all on ATA interface), I've decided to buy a new drive to back up my current stuff so I can free some HDD space. That will be concurrent with burning all the transferred items to DVD's (each in duplicate, for paranoia's sake).

Now, I'm not exactly that much up to date on my knowledge regarding HDDs or their pricing, so I'm looking for advice.

For the moment, I know it'll have to be an internal drive with 500 GB size and max price of 450 PLN (aproximately $180).
The drive will NOT be permamently installed into my machine (to extend its longevity and ensure safety of its contents), but rather connected only to back up the data and retrieve it later if neccesary (only if both DVD's fail).
Altough some of you might prefer external USB drives for this kind of thing, I've had some bad prior experience with these and as such am pretty definite on the subject of the HDD being an internal one.

Regarding the drive's interface, I'm not sure whether it should be ATA or SATA.
The three currently installed HDDs and the DVD recorder all use ATA interface leaving no further space for ATA devices unless one of them is disconnected (my motherboard is an ASRock K7-880 with an integrated SATA controller... I think it's not SATA-II, but will check the specs when I'm back home). After I move out the files, I intend to unhook the 120-gigger for use in a different PC, though.
Obviously, since the drive will be used for backup purposes only, the speed of data transfer is not a priority.

I'm completely confused regarding the things like NCQ and perpendicular write, though. Will they be of any use for me or can I just disregard them?

Also, which manufacturer would you recommend? And why?

Thanks.

I'd recommend Samsung or Western Digital. Decent brands with almost no messy reports on hardware (at least in my german ressourses... :ph34r: ) I advise against Seagate and Maxtor.

I heard that SATA doesn't work out as SATA on non-Vista-systems. So it's like 150MB/s ATA. <_<

You should be able to purchase these harddisks for less than 100€, no matter if SATA or ATA. Some ATA devices in this price area work this 10.000rpm which is an speed advantage, but you said that wouldn't be important. ^_^

there are some people that sugest that it is actually better to have a hard disk in use permenantly as if it is rarely used it may be more likely to seize up and fail.

I don't really know that much about hard drives but I would probably go for sata and if you can afford it and are really concerned about backup then got for a RAID NAS device as this provides the best guarantee of security

this is the best at raid 5 but is a bit pricey lol -

http://cgi.ebay.co.uk/Buffalo-TeraSt...QQcmdZViewItem]

raid 1 can also be used for redundancy and is much cheaper -

http://cgi.ebay.co.uk/NEW-DUAL-NAS-R...QQcmdZViewItem

for that money you should get a nice external 500GB HDD

http://www.mimovrste.com/artikel/206...00rpm-16mb-usb


IMO this seems like a good idea for back up. It' even shaped nicelly like a book so you can put it along with other books. but what do i know...

I reccomend Seagate i've never had trouble with them and find them slightly better than WD though ive never had one of them fail yet. But I have had a samsung and maxtor both fail out of the blue.

I have no idea. But one Samsung also got broken for me, although it did get a lot of usage because of virtual memory. Replaced it with a Seagate and this still works.

there is no huge difference like that.. it's very random. hardware sometimes gets broken, sometimes it's WD, sometimes it's hitachi, it can be anything. then, people, based on personal "misfortunes" judge companies (which is understandable) and tell that some are worse and some are better

of course there is some difference (if the parameters are the same), but for normal user it doesn't matter. if there were some REALY bad and buggy hard drives, you would see it on the extremely low prices and stores wouldn't trust them niether. all above mentioned companies are well known and it's not that any of them were realy terrible. and you wouldn't notice huge difference in the "OMg this has faster read speed and zomg this this one writes faster. what noWZOrz?!?!/1one" (if the parameters are same of course..)

and you have 2 years warranty and they don't give that just for fun. so if you don't like the current one, pick another one or the same one once again.

Seagate internal drives have 5 years warrenty well the one I got did It was a 160GB ATA 100 8MB Cache Seagate ST160812A

NCQ - speeds up reading/writing (the disk spins a little less, and gains access to more data, thanks to diferent algorithm of queque). Only SATA 2 propably got this feature. If you do not care about speed if it cost more - You do not need it.
perpetual something - I do not know.
I work next to a computer parts shop, and currently my fellow salesman says: Western Digital, because this year disks made by WD had lowest number of malfunctioning and returns.