I'm not much of an expert, but here's my knowledge on the subject.<BR><BR>IDE is the interface you're familiar with, ribbon cables and everything. It's a Parallel ATA system, hence PATA. It's growing ...

We're planning on putting SATA SSDs into one of our boxes at work that has a SCSI interface. I'm wary of installing a new SATA card as it's pretty old hardware and we might get compatibility problems.

Early home PCs usually had a floppy disk and a simple hard drive controller. Later, IDE hard drives became the defacto standard. Of course, these days, you are more likely to find some version of SATA ...