SATA (150 and 3.0) use a 7-pin, single drive cable interface. PATA uses a 40-pin ribbon cable with either 40 (ATA-33 and under) wires or 80-wires (for ATA-66 and up). Additionally, PATA allows for two drives per channel, set as Master or Slave via jumpers on the back of the drive. Additionally, SATA hard drives use a newer power connector specific to the SATA interface. Some SATA drives are equipped with the older, but widely universal 4-pin Molex power connector used on all PATA drives as well as other applications. SATA=Serial ATA PATA=Parallel ATA
They are all ata, its just down to whether its a serial connection or a parallel one. ATA has different "grades" ie ata33, ata66 etc. At the end of the day an ata33 has the potential to transfer at a maximum of 33mb/s. ATA66 has a maximum of 66mb/s and so on. PATA maxed out at 133mb/s and then SATA took over with 150mb/s (SATA) and also 300mb/s (SATA2) Another way of referring to the speeds is a single number ie ata33 is dma-3, ata66 is dma-4, ata100 is dma-5 and ata133 is dma-6. DMA and ATA are different but can both be used as a quick reference to identify the speed a drive can operate at. I wouldn't expect to see much of a difference between an ata133 drive and a SATA1 drive. SATA2 is where the big jump in performance came in. For comparison SCSI drives can transfer at up to 640mb/s... twice the speed of a SATA2 drive.
PATA = ATA33 = 33Mb/s transfer rate ATA66 = 66Mb/s transfer rate ATA100 = 100Mb/s transfer rate ATA133 = 133Mb/s transfer rate and SATA1 = 150 Mb/s and SATA 2 = 300Mb/s trandfer rate PATA = IDE and is older than SATA
Those are burst rates---the maximum throughput--not sustained transfers. These are typically around 40-50MB/s. The interface has less to do with the overall speed than the spindle speed, density, cache, and other advances in hard drive technology.
