Hard Drives?

[Tiusai]

what's all this FAT 32, SATA, PATA, IDE stuff? are they the interfaces that are used to connect to the motherboard?

 

[Ricemarine]

FAT 32 = partition format, like NTFS

SATA = serial ata, interface to connect to motherboard, supports more features.

PATA, ATA, IDE = another interface, usually used on DVD burners and hard drives.

 

[JimPhelpsMI]

Hi, Fat32 has twice the cluster bookkeeping (on the drive) capacity of Fat16 so the clusters can be smaller on the drive. Sata is serial data transfer, that is, one bit at a time. IDE is Parallell, that is, 8 bits (=1 byte) at the time. PATA - Ata is same as IDE. P is a slightly different scheme. Don't have details at present. Serial data rate is given as BITS PER SECOND. Parallet is given as BYTES PER SECOND. Hope this helps a little, Jim