Im a little confused bu the diference in these and would love someone yo explain to me the benefits and the weaknesses of them. Which is also the best perfdorming and general uses for each of them. i know this may be easy for most of youbut i am a newbie after all
IDE: Integrated Drive Electronics. This standard is about as old as dirt (if not older), when its bandwidth was in the single-digit Mbps range. This term is used interchangibly with UDMA (Ultra Direct Memory Access) and ATA (Advanced Technology Attachment). Been through about 8 different revisions, the latest one being ATA133, which will surely be the last as it's getting harder and harder to get any more speed reliably out of a parallel interface due to interference. SATA: Serial Advanced Technology Attachment. This is the next gen low cost interface for drives. Has several distinct advantages, the biggie being that because it's a serial interface, it can scale in speed much better. Other advantages include the removal of the master/slave hierarchy, thinner cables, hot-swappability and external support. RAID: Redundant Array of Inexpensive Disks. This is not a hard drive interface, but more of a form of disk management. Primarily for the use of data security and protection of failing hard drives (the exception being RAID 0, which can leave you doubly screwed because data is interwoven across hard drives, and if one fails, the whole array is toast). Price/performance/complexity varies greatly, from RAID 1 (mirroring), which requires 2 disks, slows down writes a bit and is fairly simply, to RAID 5 (striping with parity), which requires 3 disks, has all the advantages of RAID 0 while being able to rebuild the array in the event of a hard drive failure on one of the two striped disks. I'm not going to bother mentioning RAID for which performs the best, as you probably shouldn't be messing with if you had to ask. SATA wins basically on all fronts. IDE is a dying interface, and hopefully it will be phased out rather quickly, especially considering there are ATA->SATA converters so your old drives can hop on the new interface. The only thing that might slow down its arrival to mainstream is the fact that the power connector is completely different, and out of the small amount of power supplies that have the SATA power connector, an even smaller number are up to the SATA specification (they lack the 3.3v connection), the same problem if you were to use 4-pin to SATA converters.
