Hard drive

I need to get a new hard drive for my PC. I've not bought one for around 3 years, and that mfr (Maxtor) doesn't even exist any more... any of you bought one recently, or otherwise kept up with devpts? Who's good these days?

Internal drives mostly seem to be SATA now, which am I right in thinking isn't back-compatible with my ATA motherboard? But maybe I should be considering an external one instead -- how practical is it to use such as an actual working drive, rather than just for backup etc?

Any thoughts / recs / etc welcome!