[ILUG] Hardware queries

[kevin]

We have just had a hard drive die. Now for some of you with major datacentres 
this seems to be a regular occurence but for small fish like us its that 
first harddrive I have lost since I dropped that 80mb hard drive on the 
concrete floor about 10 years ago. So a couple of questions:

1. What manufacturer do people recommend for IDE drives? The drive that died 
was actually one of our newest drives and was a Maxtor, the other ones we 
have are Seagate and Fujitsu. The system is not complex, no raid or LVM, just 
a hard drive with a spare backed up by rsync hourly. 40GB would be plenty big 
enough and its not very heavily loaded.

2. What are SATA drives like on Linux? Are they fully compatible?

Thanks

Kevin.