With advancement of technology, SATA (Serial – ATA) drives are becoming ever more popular. The SATA controllers that operate them are smaller and cheaper to build; therefore giving motherboard manufacturers the advantage. But it’s not only the motherboard manufacturers that get something from it: The user also benefits from faster transfer times to and from the drive, thus reducing any data – bottlenecks, and also the connecting lead can be longer than that of a PATA ( Parallel – ATA) setup. (See this article.)

For the novice constructor, or even the casual observer/user seeking to upgrade their hard-drive for the first time, the difference may not be immediately apparent; hence this article. In this article I’ll show you how to identify a PATA and a SATA drive visually.

PATA

(Also known as ATA or IDE.)

A PATA drive has connectors like this on it:

On the left in the picture is the 4-pin Molex power connector’s socket. To the right in the picture is the parallel data connector, to which the ribbon-cable attaches. Between the two in the picture is the jumper connector: the position of the jumpers (Missing in the pic.) will determine whether the drive is seen by the PATA controller a master or slave drive. The ribbon-cable has connectors that look like this:

SATA

SATA drives have connectors on the drive itself that look something like this:

On the left in the picture you’ll see a 4-pin Molex connector’s socket. Some SATA drives have one, some don’t. On the right in the picture you’ll see the larger SATA connector, which is the SATA power connector. This supplies the drive with a number of voltages. You can buy an adaptor which allows a 4-pin Molex connector to be used to power a SATA drive by adapting the SATA power connector, which will work in most cases. The smaller connector in the middle in the picture is the SATA-data connector. The lead that connects to it is pictured below. (The colour of a SATA lead is usually red, but I’ve seen yellow (Gigabyte Technologies) also, and in this case, blue. (Shuttle Inc.))

So that’s how you can visually tell the difference. I hope that helps someone.