Can anybody tell me what the difference is between an ATA, SATA and PATA hard drive? Any drives I have bought in past were Maxtor ATA as I was told they were good and easy to install. I was also told that when I got a larger drive for Xbox it had to be ATA. I got an ATA for "homework" pc and it works great. The reason I'm asking is there is a Samsung 160GB PATA on For Sale items which would be a great upgrade for "house" pc but not sure what PATA is.

Have a look Here (http://www.seagate.com/products/interface/pata) This may help..:)

That link is pretty informative - to summarise, PATA is Parallel ATA, which is really just the current name for what you know as ATA, to distinguish it from SATA or Serial ATA. So that drive should be fine.

Thank you both. :thumbsup:

Have a look Here (http://www.seagate.com/products/interface/pata) This may help..:)
And rich951

Both of you 'Thank you'.
I've often wondered what the difference was.

the way i was told it (when SATA came into play)
was that ATA has many standards, each one a slight difference to the other but up until ata-7 they were all pretty much identical from a compatibility point of view (altho they could all be called different things, ATA, IDE, EIDE, UATA, PATA, Fast-IDE etc... UDMA 33, 66 ,100) - they all used a 40 pin connector (known as an IDE connector by most people).

Then came SATA/ATA-7 (also called UDMA 133 or 150 i think) there allow you to have longer cables and the data transfer top end is a lot higher, this one uses a 7 pin cable.

to plug an ATA HD into a SATA motherboard you need a convertor, but they are around - (usually search for IDE to SATA convertor and cost about 20 quid)