Many computers run well using the approved Ide (or extended Ide - Eide) hard drives and cd- and dvd-burners also exist for both formats. The Ata cable is bigger than the Sata cable, and - as most fellow-geeks will know - could be a real mess if you had cables without the slight prolongation that ensured you couldn't plug it in the wrong way. You had to remember that pin 1 was mostly towards the power plug - and the red ticket on the cable had to be pointed towards pin estimate 1. Similarly, you had the question of knowing that the former drive (called "Master") had to be at the end of the cable if you had a cable with two mounting plugs. If you forgot to set the jumper pins on your drives the right way, the engine wouldn't boot.
So restarting a engine was the order of the day if you forgot any of the many things you had to be aware of, and I'm quite sure we have all tried this. It was a real pain in the backside when you had a single-mounted Cd-burner which had to be extended with a hard drive. Whether you had to set the hard drive as secondary (so-called "Slave"), or take out the cd-burner to set it as secondary while the hard drive had to be set to master. You could use cable adopt if you were dealing with hard drives only - but a few Cd-burners didn't allow for the cable adopt feature...
Hard Drive
Therefore, many geeks were quite happy when the Sata drives came, because these are jumper-free.
If your computer doesn't have the Sata connection, you can buy an prolongation card which can deal with this format - and you then have the option to run your "normal" Ata drives from the motherboard while adding the prolongation card, and thus adding Sata drives to your existing computer. The power cords are identical, so these need not be changed or converted in any way.
You should, however, be mindful that not all computers allow you to boot from the prolongation card when you mount it on a motherboard which commonly is mounted with Ata connections, but you can sometimes solve that by flashing your Bios. Flashing your Bios is not something you want to do if you haven't done it before. If you lose power in that process you want to know how to start up your machine, and care is advised in that part of the process.
But otherwise handling the Sata format is pretty easy when compared with the record of the Ata theory described above, and you can indeed plug your drives using the new format. Speeds are bound to increase from the current 300Mb/sec - and you will feel the speed inequity immediately when you were used to having up to 133Mb/sec with Ata drives.
selecting a Hard Drive - Ata Vs SataTags : rockwellrk 9000 jawhorse grp99 Grill Electrical Work Boots