Well I was think thinking what the main differences are and I haven't got an idea. All i realized is that there is a $100 difference between them. What does Sata offer? Speed? Long term reliability? Better performance? If yes, is the difference worth it?
Given the current state of technology, specifically the maximum speeds of optical drives and the resulting data rate, SATA offers no
performance benefit. Reportedly one or two SATA optical drives may even be PATA drives with SATA/PATA adapters shimmed in. There is no difference in reliability as far as I know. In fact, some of the first SATA -equipped motherboards have had issues with optical drives.
SATA's current benefit for optical drives is mostly one of neater cabling. You could indirectly say that SATA offers an improvement in reliability actually, since the smaller cables cause less interference with air flow inside the computer case.
SATA offers performance levels for the most modern disk drives, whose data transfer rates and interface circuitry are capable of speeds far in excess of what IDE/PATA and all of its re-engineering can handle. (Who remembers ST-506 and ESDI?! The rest of you can look it up in Wikipedia.)
Oh, and ATTN: Croc... ya' should've snagged USB replacements for MS' gameport FF stuff while you could. I saw the writing on the wall, bought a USB FF stick used for $50 right about the time MS stopped making them, and still was able to sell the gameport version for $45.
Conspiracies? Not really. SATA is a dramatic evolution in bandwidth and the simpler cabling also simplifies motherboard design. So too are other improvements like USB, IEEE-1394 (aka iLink and Firewire) and PCIe. Of course none if it matters if you don't mind being stuck in the '90s. But eventually support for the legacy technology is gonna go away in modern software, especially when from a programming, portability and efficiency perspective it's a nightmare to support. Yep, the game port got dropped. You can buy a USB to game port converter but it won't support the bastardized protocol used by the FF equipment. That sort of bastardization is why you don't see support for parallel port tape drives and disk drives any longer either.
-Brad