Current 7200rpm ATA drive technology cannot saturate an ATA/133 bus, and you
will not see much difference.
SATA more about reducing integration costs and for future increases in speeds.
(Parallel buses in general exhibit problems as you increase clock rates, which
gives rise to things like firewire, USB, fibre channel -- and SATA.)
There is a small performance boost - mostly from increased transfer speeds from
the drive cache, and "enterprise" 10,000rpm SATA drives are a little faster of course, but
I would not upgrade to SATA just for the sake of having newer technology as you
will be disappointed. OTOH if you are choosing between the two, I'd prefer SATA
as the cost difference has now largely disappeared.
One problem with SATA if you are upgrading is that most of the DOS-based real
mode drive imaging programs are horribly slow on some SATA chipsets - that
really require driver support to move data efficiently.
Steve Duff, MCSE, MVP
Ergodic Systems, Inc.
