Hi I have a IDE harddrive and I was thinking about buying a SATA 3gbs harddrive. My motherboard is compatible with it I'm just wondering how these SATA drives run because I never had one. I have a IDE DVD burner will that have any impact on the SATA drive.SATA drives are generally no faster than IDE, however the cables are easier to manage, and newer drives tend to only be SATA.
My OPINION: if you're after a new drive anyway go for SATA, otherwise there's no compelling reason to change.I understand that S-ATA hardrives are a lot faster. They can go as up as 3GB/s.
As for the dvd unit, the speed should be the same. (52X for reading) So I don't think S-ATA would help you much.If you can show me a benchmark or situation where the higher theoretical maximum transfer rate of SATA actually has an advantage over IDE, I'd be interested to SEE it.
SATA - 1500Mbit/sec (actually more like 150MB/sec) or 3000Mbit/sec (300MB/sec), WHEREAS IDE has a maximum rate of 133MB/sec. Hard drives can't generally transfer DATA that fast, so the extra 17 or 167 MB/sec transfer rate has no real impact.
Do correct me if I'm wrong.
Also, DVD drives can't read at 52X speed, the maximum is 20X which equates to 211Mbit/sec or 27MB/sec.

I'm not trying to be harsh on you Cheetah, just stating the facts.I don't have any benchmarks, but SATA 3Gb/s drives have Native Command Queuing.thank you guysEg0Death, you're right about NCQ, however most things I've read say this is only useful in a server type of environment, and that for "normal" use it could even reduce HDD speed. I don't use it on my drive.