/vr/ - Retro Games

I'm pricing out doing OPL with an internal HDD. If anyone wouldn't mind helping me with a few questions:
Is there any difference between the IDE to SATA converters? Obviously it's all chinkshit, but is it all pretty much the same?
I think I saw that you could use a 3.5 or a 2.5 drive, but I assume a 2.5 would be better for the space. I just don't know what all of this looks like once its in the guts of the machine.
And for HDDs, is there an upper limit on specs that the PS2 even benefits from? I don't want to waste money on speeds that won't even be used. I assume 1TB would be plenty, since I won't go full doomsday and download literally every game, but have a pretty respectable stockpile of anything I could want to play.

I've been doing some searching regarding these answers, and there's tons of documentation, but the best sources seem to not directly answer these, and I'm running into either junk or even randomly deleted posts. Any help is appreciated.