SATA and IDE question

SATA is in many ways the bastard love child of a crack induced one night stand between SCSI and IDE. If your motherboard supported it your main drives would most likely *be* SATA, at least in my experience.

So no, they don't. Get yourself a card for the PCI slot if you must have it.

Look in the manual that came with your motherboard to see if it mentions anything about using a SATA hd. Also you can look inside your case on the motherboard and if you don't see any SATA ports like the ones shown in the picture below then your mobo doesn't support SATA.

Also, just for future reference, saying "Intel Motherboard with a Pentium 4" isn't very descriptive. You should always give people the model of the component you are using. For example, I wouldn't just say "I'm using a Gigabyte motherboard," I would say "I have a Gigabyte Socket A 7VT600 1394.

Please understand that I'm not trying to be rude or anything. But it makes it a lot easier for others to help you out if they know exactly which product they're dealing with.

And one final thing: Like Belgarath touched upon, if your motherboard doesn't support SATA natively, there are PCI host adapters you can buy, as well as IDE to SATA converters. Granted, your drive won't be as fast when using a converter, offering you absolutely no benefit, but if you absolutely MUST have a SATA drive, there you go.

SATA and IDE cables are very different. An IDE cable is about 2 inches large, a SATA cable is about half a inch large.