I'm about to purchase a HD for my nephew's birthday. The problem I'm having is that I'm unsure of what to get him.

He wants to run World of Warcraft off of it (his mother and sister have filled the other HD with random junk they've found while surfing).

The question(s):

Should I get internal or external?
The machine it's being connected to is about 3-4 years old. It used to be mine, but I forget (everything) that I put into it. Pentium/AMD, MoBo, RAM, etc... I just cannot remember!

Based on that information, could someone post a link to some good HDs that would generally support any rig (I know it was slightly above average when I built it & it DOES run WoW) and would cost around $50.

Thanks in advance.

This is a tough question to answer...

First of all, it's possible to install games onto external drives but it's usually not recommended, because the transfer speed between the computer and the drive would be somewhat slow. Since your computer is 3-4 years old I believe all it has are USB ports. USB ports have a rather slow transfer speed compared to the new eSata, and definitely slower compared to onboard IDE or SATA connections as well.

However, if you wish to get an external, any external with a USB connection should work perfectly fine.

If you wish to get an internal, since it's 3-4 years old I'd recommend getting an IDE Hard disk. But perhaps you could get your nephew to run the DAL scan so that we can find a solution that will definitely work on it?

Here's a link to IDE hard disks on newegg.

Newegg.com - Computer Hardware,Hard Drives,Internal Hard Drives,IDE Ultra ATA100,

Also you will notice that comparatively, the price of IDE hard disks are higher than SATA hard disks. But that's hard to be avoided because the technology is already considerably aged.