I'm a little confused about which type of new HDD to buy, so I thought I might get some help from the userbase. I'm looking in the range of 300GB to 500GB as the price comes down day by day. I saw a 500GB SATA II last week for $159.99!

Situation: I'm thinking of getting a larger HDD for my PC(even the laptop has a larger HDD in it!). Currently I have a 80GB hard disk and it looks a bit small day-by-day as a weekend day trip to somewhere easily adds about a GB of images, plus the constant usage of a few GB for seeding Linux distros and the ever increasing dumps of my audio collection.

My PC is Dell Dim 4500, PIV 2GHz 768MB RAM, etc. It is too old to have SATA on board, so will need a PCI controller for a SATA drive.

HDD Type: Would it be advantageous to buy a SATA II hard disk along with a PCI SATA controller card? (The controller card would the another question if SATA is better). SATA II has a data transfer rate (max?) of 300Gb/s which translates to about 384MB/s. But if I use the PCI SATA controller, does the PCI bus have enough bandwith so as not to be a bottle-neck?

Or should I just stick with a EIDE drive and just remove the old one and put the new one in its place than adding another PCI controller for the SATA? Thanks in advance