I got a Western Digital Caviar SE16 Hard Drive - 500GB, 3.5", SATA, 3 Gb/s - Internal Hard Drive. It was onsale for $90 at buy.com and I had a 5% off coupon as well. Unfortunately it arrived with no documentation at all (luckily there was some decent documentation in my PC manual) and when I went to install it I discovered that of the two spare cables inside my computer, only one of them was appropriate for installing this - a power cable. I still needed to get a SATA cable to connect it to the motherboard.
If I knew more about the insides of my new PC, I could have figured this out in advance and possibly ordered it at the same time. As it was I first called Staples - they didn't stock one. Then I called Office Depot - they said they had one for $15. I drove there and the person I spoke to on the phone wasn't around, but someone else who did know what I was talking about couldn't find one. He recommended I go to Best Buy. So, since I wanted to get one right away I did go to Best Buy and bought one there for $20. (I bet most of the price was markup profit.)
I hooked it up and then as opposed to when I added a second hard drive on previous XP and ME machines in my house, Vista didn't recognize it. Luckily I was able to do a quick google search and saw that this was a universal situation with Vista. I can't see the post I saw then, but
Second SATA drive is not recognized - Vista Forums
is a similar one.
Anyway, after going through the instructions, waiting for the drive to get formatted and such, I went to my Windows Media Center and changed where new recordings go. Then I moved a couple of shows to the new drive and it was able to find them. I also tested recording something briefly with no problems. Last night I recorded about three hours worth of stuff. It looks like I am set for a while.
Neil