running windows off sata vs ide

SATA is a little faster. You can mix IDE and SATA drives.
Not worth buying a new drive just to go with SATA.

Keep the IDE.

IMO, you will see faster load/read/write times over IDE with using a SATA drive. IDE caps out at a theoretical maximum transfer speed of 133 MB/ps, where SATA starts at 150MB/ps or 1.5GB/ps. There is also SATA II that supports up to 3GB/ps.

SATA is serial, IDE is parallel.

Both are based off of ATA technology.

IDE is more limited by devices supported. One channel supports two devices which must be set master/slave. SATA is always the master and more ports can usually be fit on a mobo.

However, as mentioned, if only to save money, move to SATA once your IDE drive dies.

But then again, if you have some money to burn, get 2-80GB SATA drives and put them in RAID0 for a significant hard drive performance gain.

This is mostly a load of crap.

1- your HDD is usually maxed out at around 50mb/sec or so (it can burst a bit higher, nothing to write home about) and the connector is wider than what the HDD can feed it regardless.

2- You could partition your 500gig hdd in two 40/460 partitions and install windows on the 40gig partition. Then, you could ditch the 80gig (which must be getting old, possibly less reliable) and save yourself the trouble.

3- Your 500gig drive is most likely slightly faster than your older 80gig drive so you would gain some performance by having it all on the same.

By the way. You won't see any IDE drives over 500gb. TO go over 500 gb they will be Sata drives or SCSI.