Thus far, I've made up my mind about...
Size:160-250GBs. I could be perfectly happy with 160, but the difference in price is small. I could even take 80GBs, but nothing that small is as fast as I want it to be.
Connection type: SATA 3GBs (usually referred to as SATA2) for maximum future compatibility and a good speed.
And brand: WD/Seagate/Maxtor, 'cos they possess full backward compatibility for motherboard chipsets that use SATA but don't handle SATA2 despite usual compatibility, like mine (click here to see my motherboard). They have this special jumper feature to handle such an issue. Though, if anyone think this is not true, feel free to say so please! I'm not an absolute expert by any means.
My problem now, is about the buffer/cache size (I'm using the terms indistinctly. Pardon my ignorance).
I see some SATA and SATA2 hard disks offering 2MBs, which I assume is bigger than what IDE/ATA normally offer. Others, 8MBs. Yet others, 16MBs. I've been told the buffer size makes a sizeable difference, and I know what a buffer is meant for, but I'm not positively sure how this would actually affect the overall speed. If buffer size is of small significance, I'd rather save myself some U$S30.
So, if any of you could give me pointers and suggestions about this, or anything else that I should keep in mind when it comes to speed (they're all 7200RPM I think)...I'd be very grateful.
Thank you all for your time.