right now i have 2 80 gig ATA 100 IDE drives and i was wondering will you see a system performance increase with a SATA Drive , and also if you like pc games will a SATA Drive increase game performance when running on your machine?

Hey there epc51

This is a question that a lot of people have, try searching google for Sata vs Pata and you will see a load of results, most of them say that you will not see a difference in speed.

In my opinion you don't notice too much difference, but the Sata drives do run at a faster MBps compared to the ATA so that must do something. Probably help with the read/write rate.

See quote below:
Seeing as though we are already into 2006 it would be interesting to see whether the 300MBps has come out, if so then I think you will notice a difference.

As for gaming, I cannot see it making any difference with performance.