how to i tell if i have ATA or SATA

okay, how do i tell if i have ATA or SATA? The reason I ask is because the mobo I ordered aparantly doesnt support SATA very well. I opened up my comp and there are IDE cables (im guessing they are the grey ribbon like cables) connecting to the hard disk. I googled up some ATA pics and they all seemed to have those cables attached to the hard disk.



When did SATA come out btw?

If you have SATA then your HDD would be using a cable like this:







And if your HDD is using an IDE cable, then you have PATA:

whats the diff b/t pata and sata?

SATA is a bit faster and the cables are much smaller. Newer HDDs use SATA2 and there a a good deal faster.

generally the drives are the same, some SATA have higher RPM/Cache than PATA drives but an SATA 7200RPM 8MB cache drive will perform similarly to a PATA 7200RPM 8MB cache drive.

cool, well thanks for the help. As long as I dont get those random boot-up problems i should be good.