How to find compatible Hard Drive for my motherboard?

Sorry didn't answer the comparability part of your question . Any sata hard drive will be compatible , you can use anything with speeds from 5400 up either in 2.5 or 3.5 format , you can also consider SSD or Hybrid Drives the only consideration is what you want to do with it . If your playing games faster is better and SSD are even better still . To determine speed check the rpm number and the sata connection . Your board does limit you to sata 3 so if you do get a sata6 it will work but not to its full potential

@jimfixer Thanks a lot for your very informative response. I just bought (from a local guy thru' craigslist) a SATA 250GB WDC Blue Hard Drive, that should be good for my first trial build. I'm curious when you mentioned you made bunch of gaming computer that cost next to nothing - do you mind giving me some directions/links/thoughts about how to make a high speed gaming computer, which still doesn't cost much (not sure if it can be build cheap). This will be my food for thought. Thanks again!

@sud I have no links for this its all about foot work and contacts. Check with neighborhood computer store owners start to network with people who work in the industries like gaming and movie production find out what they do with old computers and older servers or render blades . use these parts to build with . Its all in who you get to know and meet . Im fortunate in that my son works for a special effects company in Toronto . They have a constant turn over of older tek .

@sud These companies need to remain current and they old stuff in his case ends up in the basement in storage . Ive also got another friend who works for a large gaming company near me and I get older stuff from them . Understand there not new and coming close to EOL but there still viable machines that will outperform most of the stuff you get at best buy. Just as an example my last build was from a render blade with a Asus Rampage II gene MB It had 24gb of ram an Intel Core i7-980X CPU. I got an old ASUS GeForce GTX 750 Ti from the gaming company . I do have to buy hard drives as most companys tend to destroy anything that has there work on it .

@sud I get old power supplies from a couple of MOM and POP computer shops I've done business with over the years as well as cabling and heat-sinks and such. It doesnt hurt that Im doing this for a kids club. but if you put yourself out there and look to find you will find this stuff and if people know your looking they seem to come to you. Best of Luck

@danj, read the article and actually look at the previous charts. You are simply focusing on a single bar chart. Also, this is specific to their own data center.

Your referenced bar chart a) "combined all of the drives, regardless of size, for a given manufacturer."

b) in the quantity tested, they admit insufficient non seagates to test with

"For Toshiba we have not been able to find their drives in sufficient quantities at a reasonable price. For WDC, we sometimes get offered a good price for the quantities we need, but before the deal gets done something goes sideways and the deal doesn’t happen. This has happened to us multiple times, as recently as last month. We would be happy to buy more drives from Toshiba and WDC, if we could, until then we’ll continue to buy our drives from Seagate and HGST."

This is not acceptable for a reliability report. This basically says the report leans toward Seagate in the chart you refer to, as this is the only source that is abundant for testing in.

@avanteguarde - My point was to make sure you are offering up current info as old info can be misleading on what is truly going on. The Thailand flood hit the drive makers quite hard which effected quality and availability.

I have no bias on who's drive someone uses as long as it works within a given system. As an example I have a good collection of different drives in my home systems presently I have only one Seagate, 4 WD & 4 HGST 3.5" drives as well as 2 Toshiba 2.5" HD's the rest are 2.5" SSD's.

I'll admit I tend to push Seagate SSHD drives but only because many of the systems that need drives are the older models which can't support the other makers drives.

As to what is a good reliably report this only covers data warehousing type of drives (3.5"). One could argue this has no bearing on the consumer drives. I'm not so sure of that. Many of these companies use the same designs and hardware across the different markets, only the number of platters and other minor alterations from the basic design can be found between them (with the exception with the HE drives).

I don't know of any other good data sources other than BackBlaze with real usage. I only referenced it as you did in your original posting.

FYI: Here's BackBlazes Q3 stats: Hard Drive Stats for Q3 2016: Less is More and here's their end of year report: Backblaze Hard Drive Stats for 2016