With Hard Drives, is an ATA-100 interface the same as SATA?
No. ATA-100 is often referred to either as PATA (parallel AT Attachment) or IDE, as opposed to the Serial AT Attachment (SATA). ATA-100 gives you max transfer speeds of 100 Mbps compared to the 1500 Mbps or 3000 Mbps of SATA (depending on which version of SATA you have). ATA-100 uses the big giant ribbon cables, the SATA cables are much smaller. Both cache and speed are important, but speed is probably going to be more important. However, you really don’t need a 10,000 RPM hard drive. If you have enough RAM, the computer will just load stuff into there ahead of time.
Yeah, they used to be call eide drives, now they’re call ata or pata which is different than sata. So they’re not the same. As far as downloading, you won’t notice any difference because the drive speed is greater than your download speed. The raptor drive is a faster drive, smaller capacity, and way more expensive, but you get what you pay for. It should boot up faster for you and programs will launch faster. Depending on the applications you’re running you may notice improvement if it requires a lot of disk access. But if not, then you probably won’t notice much after that.
