[Xaus]

I'm not entirely sure what SATA is, but I understand its another port or socket on the motherboard for connecting your HDD? If I'm right, does that mean that if the board says it supports SATA, that it will also support my IDE HDD? Or do they either support one or the other?

Thanks in advance.

[King X13]

It will support IDE also.

[brinks]

Yes, you can run both an ide and sata hard drive at the same time.

[Vybuni]

SATA (Serial ATA) is basically just a faster, newer interface than IDE (ATA). Almost all boards with SATA ports will have at an IDE interface. Very few optical drives use SATA, and SATA is far from dominating the hard drive market, so there is still a lot of support for IDE. If your board says that it supports SATA it doesn't necessarily support IDE, although it is almost certain that does support IDE.

[Blind_Arrow]

yup, same like you'll use Optical drives with S-ATA, where I havent seen any DVD/CD Drive on SATA, you can use Hard Drives as well, prefer using ATA H/D for data and S-ATA for O/S and Applications

[Ethereal_Dragon]

As long as your motherboard has IDE connecters you can use both...

For the record, my DVD burner is SATA.
Went SATA because the cables are MUCH smaller & easier to work with, and in a SFF chassis, you need as much space for decent airflow as you can get.