IDE or SATA?

I just bought a new WD 120 gig SATA HDD that appears to be bad (P.C. is a new build). I'm sending it back tommorow and I'm just gonna get one at Best Buy tonite. The RPM's and seek times appear indentical in both types, should I bother getting a Sata?

 

SATA drives don't offer a significant amount of performance increase. If I were you, I'd just get an IDE drive since you can usually get a load of rebates on them. i.e. a 80Gb hdd for $40-$50. Or a 160Gb drive for about $70. Of course you do have to mail in the rebates.

 

The biggest advantage to SATA drives... today... is the fact that the IDE interface is being phased out in favor of SATA. In a few years motherboards won't HAVE IDE at all. So if there's a chance you'll want to use that drive in a newer system down the road, SATA makes sense. Plus, current system that have the secondary SATA controller give you two more drive options than IDE alone. 4 IDE boxes plus two more on SATA in case you want to run more drives than normal.

Current downside to SATA is that it's not a standard yet. Using them requires special drivers, and installing Windows to an SATA drive requires installing the driver at the beginning of the Windows installation, from a floppy drive, and initial setup is a little more complicated. And a lot of the current drive utility software (backup & imaging in particular) won't see an SATA drive from their external boot disks. That's all changing as SATA becomes more common, and most of the problems will disappear when SATA is integrated into the main chipset, but it's an annoyance today.