Currently have dell with (I believe) pata. Can I put in sata? What's the difference?

Different connection architecture. SATA has, I believe, a tiny edge on throughput speed, but has the potential for a much larger edge eventually. I'm told users can't really see a difference in speed yet.

If you want SATA, you'll need to have a newer Dell computer or buy a PCI card to make the conversion. Motherboards older than about a year didn't have SATA connectors.

Not much, really. Thinner connectors/power cables. SATA II drives (the newest versions) support higher throughputs (300 MB/S), Native Command Queing (NCQ) which can make the drive perform much faster in certain situations.

SATA drives are also currently much more expensive and any deals are almost non-existent. PATA drives are on their way out, and are they cheap! This week you could get a 160GB PATA drive for $30 AR/AC/PM... A SATA drive like that from Newegg would run you about $100...

You can get a Serial-ATA to IDE Adapter for around $20 +/-.

I think the last Compaq deal I saw had SATA HD's.......I could be wrong

If we buy one of these.....will there be ATA connectors for our current DVD burners, extra HD's?
will the MB have both connectors...or need for an adapter as Alan mentioned?

We all have tons of these HD deals laying around that is NOT sata

thanks all

For the rest of 2005 at least, all machines will have at least two IDE (=four devices) slots, along with any SATA (at least two slots...SATA is one per device, unlike 2 for IDE).

Note that the adapters are sometimes taller than the height of the drive (about 0.5" thick), so you may have problems stacking two drives+adapters on top of each other. Of course, the adapter will not give you native SATA features such as the (theoretically) higher transer rate, NCQ, etc.

Thanks.....

SATA drives can run at 10000RPM (Like SCSI), Pata can not. So that's one reason why they are faster right now. Gamers love the SATA Raptor harddrive.