First; what is SATA and what is IDE?

From Wikipedia:

“Conceptually, SATA is a ‘wire replacement’ for the older AT Attachment standard (ATA). Serial ATA host-adapters and devices communicate via a high-speed serial cable.

SATA offers several compelling advantages over the older parallel ATA interface: reduced cable-bulk and cost (8 pins vs. 40 pins), faster and more efficient data transfer, and the ability to remove or add devices while operating (hot swapping).

As of 2009, SATA has all but replaced the legacy ATA (retroactively renamed Parallel ATA or PATA) in all shipping consumer PCs.”  

“The current ATA/ATAPI standard is the result of a long history of incremental technical development. ATA/ATAPI is an evolution of the AT Attachment Interface, which was itself evolved in several stages from Western Digital’s original Integrated Drive Electronics interface. As a result, many near-synonyms for ATA/ATAPI and its previous incarnations exist, including abbreviations such as IDE which are still in common informal use. With the market introduction of Serial ATA in 2003, the original ATA was retroactively renamed Parallel ATA (PATA).

Parallel ATA standards allow cable lengths up to only 18 inches (46 centimetres). Because of this length limit the technology normally appears as an internal computer storage interface. For many years ATA provided the most common and the least expensive interface for this application. By the beginning of 2007 it had largely been replaced by Serial ATA (SATA) in new systems”

“OK; so you can copy & paste:” Says the reader. 

“- I’m wanting to replace my hard-drive. Do I go for SATA or do I go for IDE?”

The question might be more like: “Which will my existing motherboard allow me to install?”

If your existing motherboard is 5 years old or more then it’s unlikely that there is any provision made for SATA drives. If you want to stick to the same motherboard and have a SATA drive installed then there is a way around it; but it depends upon what operating system you’re running as to exactly what that may be. The basic idea is to install a PCI RAID card and run the SATA drive(s) from that. However there may be problems with older operating systems with regard to this:

I’m thinking Windows here: If you’re running Linux or something similar then I will leave it to you to suss it out, as there are so many distros that it’s impossible for me to cover them all herein.

If you’re running Windows XP or earlier and you have an older motherboard without provision for SATA drives then you’re probably stuffed as far as SATA is concerned, and you’ll have to replace your old IDE hard-drive with another IDE drive.

The reason is that Windows XP runs SATA drives in an IDE emulation mode, and older versions of Windows have no support for SATA drives whatsoever as far as I’m aware. (If anyone knows otherwise then please comment below.) Therefore, in these cases, Windows will look for a storage drive to boot from on the motherboard. Since there is no provision for the SATA drive you installed to a RAID card on the motherboard the BIOS will not find any hard-drive and will report this. The SATA drive you installed via the PCI RAID card won’t be seen, because the RAID card needs drivers before it can work – and where are the drivers? On the SATA HDD, which the system can’t see because the RAID card has no drivers.

IF you installed an IDE hard-drive, from which the BIOS could boot the operating system and install the RAID card’s driver, then the system would be able to see the SATA drive in Windows XP and use it as a second drive.

Actually I’ve just realised here that any operating system would do much the same; as regardless of the way that it operates SATA drives, it simply won’t see a SATA drive connected via a RAID card without any drivers. – So whatever the case you’re screwed unless your board has a built-in SATA capability. If it doesn’t then as you can see above, you can use a SATA drive via a RAID card as a secondary drive; but not as a primary.

Having said all that I’m willing to be proved wrong; as that lot was something I worked out by complex logic.

Anyway, regardless of this; it’s fairly unlikely in this day and age that you’ll want to run a SATA drive on a board that doesn’t support SATA, if any such motherboards are still in use that is. If this should be the case in your situation, however, then I’d advise you either to install a new IDE drive, (They’re still available to buy new from most computer component retailers at time of writing, (1st March 2009) and even if they disappear from that source I would imagine that there’ll be a number of secondhand IDE drives available on eBay or Craigslist for a few years yet.) or get a new motherboard or a new computer.

(I’m not saying that it’s not possible to run XP on an all-SATA computer: I’ve actually built an all-SATA computer, running 2 HDDS in RAID 1, and installed XP on it without a problem. The customer is still using it to this day without any issues.)

Wow we spent a lot of time on that didn’t we? Most motherboards in use these days will have provision for SATA drives: Normally at least 2 SATA ports on the motherboard itself that is. There’ll possibly be at least 1 IDE port too. So back to the question: SATA or IDE?

If your motherboard has provision for both then the choice is yours, after all it’s your machine. You might have an IDE DVD-RW drive which uses the IDE port, and an IDE hard-drive which shares the IDE ribbon with it, or you might just have the IDE DVD-RW connected to the IDE port and a SATA hard-drive connected to one of the SATA ports.

Whatever your setup, and whichever technology you replace or add to your hard-drive(s) with; remember that IDE is yesterday’s technology and is obsolescent: It’s being phased out. SATA is today and tomorrow’s technology, and it’s being phased in. In the light of that it makes sense to choose SATA if you can, and only use IDE where you have no other choice.

Would you agree with this or any other issues raised herein, or do you disagree? Please comment below.