PATA drive & REPLAYTV 4XXX?? will they work?

PATA means Parallel ATA versus SATA means Serial ATA. An IDE and PATA drive are the same thing. The term PATA was invented after SATA drives came out to distinguish them. Some people use IDE and SATA instead...

By the way, lots of drives use perpendicular storage to achieve their high capacities. The Replay doesn't really know how the drive gets the capacity that it does, just that it's an IDE drive. The only drives I've read about not working in the 4Ks in the Western Digital AA drives (basically, any modern Western Digital drive). But, pretty much anything else should be fine...

Henry

If you never hit the bad spot you're good. When you do, your Replay might lock up.
A slightly expensive solution is Spinright from Gibson Research, which is as good as consumer-level software gets at reconditioning drives and can fix or at least mark-bad faulty sectors, much more thorough than SeaTools. That said, once a drive starts to develop bad spots it's much more likely to develop more. With Replay-sized drives getting pretty cheap you're better off getting a new drive for the long term.