I have a sort of old computer with an asus a7n8x motherboard, and it has 2x IDE connectors, ultra dma 133/100/66/33. It seems like all the modern hard drives these days are SATA standard. So how is SATA better than IDE? I don't know much about it. I browsed through some available IDE HD's, and they seem to be the same in everything as the SATA drives. You can get a 7200 rpm IDE drive, just as you can for SATA. So, apparently IDE can handle data transmission just fine, right? So why did manufacturers make the switch? Further, is there good reason for me to switch? I see that there are sata controller cards. So I could just pop one of those into my pci slot and start using sata drives even with my IDE-equipped motherboard. Correct? Should I do this? The only problem with IDE is it looks like the HD selection isn't nearly as good. I didn't even see any 1TB drives with IDE on newegg. The biggest one was 500GB. What's up with that? Is it because HD companies made the switch to SATA and didn't bother developing larger IDE drives past a certain point? Finally, how big of a deal is the rpm speed on drives? Back when I built my computer I think they were all 5400rpm. Now many are 7200 rpm. What's the impact on system performance? Thanks
