ata or sata?? What's the diffrence?

[i_go_comando]

Thinking of getting another hard drive and my board is sata compatible and i have been given 1 little funny leads and 1 strange looking power lead when i bought it. At the moment i have an 80gb ide hard drive. Can i run both sata and my ata hard drive together? And what are the diffrences?? Any help would be appreciated.

[BillyNoMates]

Yes you should be able to run both together. Both are essentially the same although SATA - the S stands for Serial - is likely to be faster at transfering data.

The ATA dirve will be connected with either an 40 or 80 conductor ribbon cable as it transfers data in parallel.

[bobjim1705]

ATA has a transfer rate of 133mb/s, whereas SATA has 150mb/s transfer rate.
For the record, there's also SATA2 which has 300mb/s.

The power lead you have will be to connect your SATA drive to your PSU in the chance that it doesn't support SATA.

[javelinpc]

if your MB supports both and you have sufficient/appropriate power connectors on your PSU then you can have as many ATA/SATA drives as you have connectors on your MB......

As far as speed/performance is concerned... You'll probably not notice ANY difference at all... the speeds concerned are really indistinguishable from each other in all but the most powerful and memory intensive applications