I recently had to install a new hard drive in a computer that was about 2 years old. Before purchasing the new hard drive I needed to determine the interface the hard drive uses. There are currently two interfaces in existence today: PATA (IDE or EIDE) and SATA.
For newer computers, you will probably find SATA, while in my particular instance it was PATA. In this post I discuss both PATA and SATA by provided a brief background, the different ATA specifications and how devices are connected to each interface.