New Disk Drive

Well, I've been assigned the task of upgrading my family's old computer with a new disk drive. Currently it has 2 drives installed in it, a 120GB one and a 30GB one, the bigger one used for periodic backup of the smaller one. What we need is a disk drive bigger than the 120GB by several orders of magnitude, possibly a 500GB one so that the 120GB drive will become the main one and the 500 can be used as the backup.

The computer is about 5 or 6 years old with Windows XP so I'm assuming there shouldn't be any compatibility issues with new drives, correct me if I'm wrong.

We've experienced recent slowdowns when trying to use the computer, which I'm pretty sure stem from the lack of remaining disk space, but we are considering going the Linux route. Would this be advisable? - Would my semi-computer literate mother and aunt be able to use Linux without a problem or would it be too difficult? I've also heard of certain programs not working with Linux but nontheless, I'm not going to be running Guild Wars or anything on it, it's pretty much going to be for sole Internet Browsing and e-mail usage.


tl;dr:
1. Would I experience any compatibility issues with a 5-6 year old CPU and newer disk drives?
2. How big of a disk drive should I get?
3. Is Linux easy enough for my family to understand? What about compatibility issues?

If you got a sata port on your motherboard http://www.ufsexplorer.com/inf/sata-mb.jpg it will work

and use this if you don't have a sata connection on your power supply http://amigakit.leamancomputing.com/...pter-cable.jpg

500gb seems big enough but hardisk are really cheap nowadays so picking up a 1tb disk aint a bad choice either

I don't got any experience with linux so I can't help you out with that im sorry

if your mother is anything like my mother or most mothers I would NOT suggest Linux. Not that it's bad for what you want to do with it, but they will be confused and intimidated by it very quickly.

Your computer might very well use IDE hard drives and not SATA, be sure to check that out prior to purchasing anything.

So I took a closer look inside the computer and it's hardware and I found that the cables used are indeed IDE (thanks for the images Lourens). I've also advised my uncle against installing Linux onto the machine, even though both him and I are computer literate enough to understand, it would be a nightmare to teach the women :P

Since we live in Canada, albeit right beside both a Future Shop and Best Buy, I will have to look around to see what the best price is. I'm assuming an online competitor such as Newegg.ca will probably have better prices, but that depends if we want to wait for shipping.

I've seen prices for 500GB HDDs go for around 60-80$CAD so that's not too bad, currently looking at this one: http://www.newegg.ca/Product/Product...82E16822136358
Is there anything exceptionally bad or something I'm missing about this HDD?

There's nothing wrong with that harddrive

I am not sure if anyone else has experienced this with Windows XP but the recent updates like in the last month or so has crippled a lot of older systems. My work system which is old like yours takes over 5 minutes to turn on. Well it was never like that before the updates. The resources back when you bought it worked well but now are not enough. So it is an easy question to answer is do you have enough Ram so the machine is not using the hard drive as backup Ram (slows performance big time)

You say that your hardware is IDE (did you mean SATA?), but the drive you linked is SATA. Unless you have SATA ports on your motherboard, you can't use it.
Also, there is a possibility that your motherboard could have problems with hard drives over 120Gig in size. (Although partitioning it would get around that sort of.)

If your motherboard/computer has USB2 ports (not the older USB), you might be better off to get an external 500Gig (or larger) USB2 drive to do the backups on. Or, if you only have USB1 ports, a USB2 PCI card is fairly cheap.

http://www.futureshop.ca/catalog/pro...30&catid=23795

http://www.futureshop.ca/catalog/pro...48&catid=11288

(You may be able to get a USB port card much cheaper from Newegg.)

Here's a 500Gig IDE drive - it's priceyt though
http://www.futureshop.ca/catalog/pro... 119793&catid=

if you end up somehow getting a SATA port (either through an adapter/add-on card or new motherboard/cpu), this is supposedly one of the quieter/cooler/more power efficient hard drives out, with good performance, despite it not being labeled "green":

http://www.google.com/products/catal...067&sa=title#p