For the moment I have one 7200 rpm 60 Gb and one 5200 rpm 10 Gb harddrive both IDE. On the first I only have a few Gb free and on the second a few 100 Mb. I can't defragment the drives.So it seems I need a new harddrive just because of lack of storage place.How big should it be. The cheapest I find is on 80 Gb.One very interesting drive is Hitachi Deskstar 7K250 SATA 160 Gbsomewhat more expensive. It has been best in test in computer magazine.My motherboard only supports SATA II. Is it possible to get a SATA II card and using SATA II drives. I have heard that SATA I does not give much performce gain compared to IDE.Should partion the drive or is it best to use it as one whole drive?BTW do I need to buy a dedicated program for partioning?

I find it hard to believe your motherboard only supports SATA II, generally all stuff is backwards compatible but I could be wrong. I would partition the new drive, about 15GB for windows and other programs, like Office and such and then whatever is left create it as one and put games on that. Partition can be done when you install XP.

All SATA II ports are backwards compatible with SATA 150 and I've yet to see a mobo that doesn't have the legacy IDE ports still there... My board is only a few months old and has all three.

>I find it hard to believe your motherboard only supports SATA>II, generally all stuff is backwards compatible but I could be>wrong. So do I. It was typing error. should be SATA I.

I may be wrong but, I'm under the impression the even Present SATA 1 150 drives (even WD raptors 2 10,000 rpm) do not max out the bandwith of SATA 1.Present SATA 2 3gig drives appear to be even slower. They appear to be IDE drives with a SATA interface slapped on.It should be understood that SATA 2 includes other upgraded standards in addition to potential bandwith increases.The key word here is "potential"Personally I'm putting together a sys that includes a SATA 2 capable MOBO but wiil be installing a pair of Raptors (SATA 1) in RAID 0