identify parts

Hello I am considering getting an external hardrive. I tried to determine what I need in device manager re: sata etc but am confused. I have a Dell Dimension 4600 desktop. Where can I learn to look at the info I need ? Is it possible to get a hard drive for this older pc that will most likely be compatible with a new one should this give out. It seems some devices are becoming more universal than before. I am thinking of imaging so I would need the external drive to be ?200 GB? My current hard drive is 40 GB but a new pc would be greater in size. Thank you

As best I can make out you have an ide drive in that system, but would need the model number of the drive to confirm for sure, you may be able to get that info from the device manager if you expand the hard drives bit, as to getting a universal drive Sata is the ideal, but unless your motherboard supports Sata you will have to stick with ide, but more and more boards are coming out without, or only minimal ide connectors, should your board not have Sata ports, you could still get a Sata drive, BUT, you would need to get a Sata card to connect it too. You could get Everest and run that, then look under the summary of the results it should list what board you have, and what hard drive among all the other hardware, once we can identify what the system has, we can then suggest what may be your way forward to achieve your end goal.

My device manager: Disk drives -Maxtor Ge040L0, details - Ide disk Maxtor Computer - ACPI uniprocessor pc Controllers - IDE ATA/ATAPI This probably means I would need a SATA card to connect the external drive to? Is this possible with all pcs? Microcenter is near my home and you can build your own pc there;any comments/caveats?

An external drive is going to connect via USB on your present "older" machine, and will connect via USB on any new machine in the foreseeable future.

You definitely have an ide drive in that system as I suspected, but I overlooked the external point, luckily Doug picked up on that, and as he rightly states USB drives make no difference what type of drive they are when working with any system, the only difference an external drive type makes is down to speed, Sata is the faster option, BUT, USB will throttle it because it can't handle that, so no matter what you get, using USB limits the speed it can work at, modern systems are using eSATA a lot now, this is the better approach speed wise, but your system would need to have an eSATA port to use this. But that said many new external drives have more than 1 connection type, so thinking to the future you could get a USB Sata drive that can also connect via eSATA, this would be the wisest move IMHO, then when you upgrade your system it will be able to accept the external drives faster connection type, assuming you make sure the new system has eSATA, hope this clears things up, and sorry for missing the external bit previously.