By Nathan Carey
Until recently, it was common for computers to be equipped with an IDE hard drive. These days most computers, including laptops, are likely to use the newer SATA hard drives. If you're confused about the difference, here's what you need to know:
Performance
This one of the most important reasons to make sure you get a computer with a SATA harddrive. IDE is much slower than SATA. Even the fastest IDE drive, which has a data transfer speed of 133MB/s is slower than a standard SATA drive, which has a transfer rate of 150MB/s. In fact newer SATA II drives have doubled that to 300MB/s.
While the numbers may not mean much, you will notice a big speed increase when using SATA. This is especially true if you work with large video, sound or graphics files.
Capacity
With SATA you can store a lot more information. IDE harddrives typically have a maximum storage of 500MB. Current SATA drives can hold 2TB, that's four times as much as an IDE.
Cables
Physically, you may not notice too much difference between the drives. However, the connections used are very different.
IDE uses a ribbon cable. This is a flat grayish cable that has a connector with 40pins.
SATA, on the other hand, has a much smaller 7pin cable that is typically red in color.
Jumpers
In a computer system, it's possible to have more than one harddrive. To connect multiple IDE drives, you need to chain the ribbon cables from one to the next. The computer system has no idea which is the main drive, from which to load the operating system. For this reason, IDE drives have a 'jumper' pin. The position of the pin will determine if it is a 'master' or a 'slave'.
SATA drives don't use jumpers. Each drive connects directly to the motherboard. To set the primary drive, you can access the settings from the computers BIOS (special software that runs when you start the computer).
There are other differences, but these ones you see here are the main differences between SATA and IDE harddrives.
If you're considering upgrading to a 1TB Hard Drive, or maybe even bigger, you can find more information and advice on terabyte drives at http://www.teraharddrive.com/
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