Selecting a Internal Backup Drive and Acronis WD Operation

WD Internal Drives Desktop & Mobile Drives
1

I like to get some input on a backup drive and Acronis operation for a desktop running Win XP SP3.  The motherboard uses a Intel® P965 / ICH8R chipset, a JMicron® JMB363 SATA controller  (SATA 3.0 Gb/s). I presently have a  wd2500js  250GB and I am looking  at 500 GB drive  RE4 WD5003ABYX as the backup.  No RAID is used.  What other info do I need to check to make sure this drive is compatible with my system?   

For the Acronis WD Edition Backup I would like to know if it is possible to do the following:

1)  Install the backup drive and create an image of the source drive .  I believe this is a clone.

  1. Make incremental backups of modified files every day which append to the image.

  2. Access individual backup files

4)  Continue to use the original source drive until there is a failure.

  1. Swap the backup drive for the source drive and reboot.  I know I may have to boot to a CD first and do some set up, but the process should be straight forward and reliable.
2

Acronis WD Edition works as long as there is at least 1 WD drive installed in the system.  To verify the compatibility of the drive I suggest you to contact the computer manufacturer.