Hello, I'm new to the forum and would like your opinion on what would be the best 500gb external hard drive to purchase. My current computer has a 100 gb WD HDD and is starting to run out of space. It is an ata-100 ide drive.
What I would like to do is transfer all of my data (pictures, 40 gb worth, music etc.) from the drive to the new 500gb drive freeing up space. I've done some investigating and it seems most new external drive are e-sata drives with USB 2.0 connection. Is it overkill to get this type of drive as I would be connecting it via USB connection? I do not have a sata connection, my computer is to older than 2 years. I also have a second internal HDD on the second channel of one of the IDE controllers. The other channel has two optical drives. I will be disk cloning to the new 500gb hdd (do it once a month as backup) as well as adding back up data from my second internal drive.
My focus has been on WD drives as well as Seagate but I'm concerned about the life expectancy of the drives. The external drive will be stationary, I do not intend to use it as a mobile drive.
So, any recommendations are appreciated.

Thanks for the help!

I wouldn't pay extra for a eSATA connection if you're not using it. I prefer Seagate over any other drive. You could also assemble it yourself. Buy a case with a SATA internal connection and eSATA as well as a USB external connection and then buy the drive. This has the advantage that if you ever run into a connection problem, you can always install the drive internally. You could also get a smaller drive and replace it with a larger one later. If you only have 40GB of data to back up, you don't need a 500GB hdd, probably a 160GB would do. Something like this would work and comes with an eSATA card
http://www.newegg.com/product/prod [...] 6817113026