IDE or SATA HDD

[Supergoal]

At the moment I have an IDE 250Gb HDD running through an IDE cable which also runs the Optical drive.

Would Getting a SATA HDD and thus keeping only the optical drive on the IDE cable improve the system speed as a whole?

Also inside my machine it's an absolute nightmare concerning cables and not being long enough along with bad air flow. The IDE cable is one of the main culprits.

Any help appreciated.

 

[choirbass]

concerning airflow... that is one of the advantages of sata over pata... pata has wide ribbon cables that obstruct airflow, and are a hassle to deal with in general... with sata, you can just go routing the cables wherever; theyre narrow and long enough to fit pretty much anywhere, and you dont have to worry about bending pins or anything on the hdd or sata controller

concerning speed... sata in itself wont speed your system up... ...there isnt a single consumer hdd available today that is bottlenecked by the ata-133 interface (or even ata-100 in most cases)

but, if you purchase a new sata hdd, it may very well be faster than your current hdd is anyhow (but not due to being sata150 or sata300, those are just interfaces, like ata-100 and ata-133) and there arent any master/slave jumpers to mess with then either; each drive is a master on its own channel, and has the full channel bandwidth to use for itself

but, it certainly cant hurt to change from pata to sata

 

[GherkinPekul]

Get some rounded IDE cables for a cost effective band-aid solution.
Rounded cables
Good Luck

 

[MaxLatG]

I agree with GherkinPekul, rounded cables are a cheap way out, unless you're just dying for a new HDD, then SATA is the way to go.