S-ata \ S-ata2

They are believed to be slightly quicker, I say "believed" because up to now they seem to be like gold dust. As to if you can or cannot "see" the difference is harder to say. Overall you would "see" the difference with a stop watch, i.e. seek times and the fact that they will tend to have a larger cached buffer,maxtor for example at 16MB, as opposed to the 8MB. Seek times will be generally faster usually -8 or -9 ms. There will be a general speed increase but it will mainly be an "overall" one. Those who will "see" the benefits more than others will be: video editors, some gamers and cad users, simply because the information is more speedily available.
However, in reality as the actual Hard Disk is the same . SATA / IDE / SATA2 are the interface technology names. The interface only handles the data from the disc to the motherboard. The slowest thing is the HD its a mechanical thing the best go at maybe 70mbyte/sec ie 560mbits/sec all well within ATA100 ( 100mbytes/sec) let alone ata133 or SATA150 . Its a bit like having a huge water tank feeding a long thin pipe to your tap you get a trickle ( like Big disk/big cache on USB1) and the mains feed on a 22mm pipe keeps up easily. The other extreme is having a pipe 20foot in diameter to an equally big tap when the tank empties in milliseconds and you have to wait for the tank to fill from the mains via a 22mm pipe ( SATAxx) . In both cases the water main feeds at the same basic rate no matter what .

Hope this has been of some help to you.

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This has been said time and again, but I guess it needs to be said again. THE BANDWIDTH OF THE INTERFACE DOES NOT DETERMINE THE SPEED OF THE DRIVE!!!

Just because SATA 1 supports a (hypothetical) bandwidth of 150MB/s doesn't mean that the drive can fill that bandwidth. SATA drive are physically identical to their PATA counterparts and have the exact same speed. There are some very minor benefits with regard to system overhead, but not such that you would ever actually notice.

Drive today top out somewhere around 80MB/s. So, why the higher bandwidth of the bus? Marketing is one. People hear that the interface is twice as fast o that must be good, right? No. But, there are some real benefits. The SATA2 allows for external connections of up to five drives on a single channel. 5 drives x 80MB/s = 400MB/s. And since all drives would not be operating at maximum throughput at the same time 300MB/s would be about right.

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Maybe, maybe not. Very recent mboard chipsets on mboards that have SATA but not SATA 2 may recognize the drive and the drive will work at SATA specs, but many older chipsets require there be a jumper to SATA on the drive.
E.G. A WD SATA 2 drive auto detects whether the mboard supports SATA or SATA 2 and auto sets itself, but this specifies some chipsets that can't detect a SATA 2 drive.
http://www.lifecomputers.co.il/uploadFiles/632680753562968750115.pdf
You can add the ATI RS480 / RS482M mboard chipsets to that list - I installed a MSI mboard about a month ago and it couldn't detect a SATA 2 drive automatically.

If your mboard has a chipset that can't recognize a SATA 2 drive and set it to SATA specs automatically, in order to use a SATA 2 drive on a mboard that has only SATA capability the SATA 2 drive has to have a jumper position available on it such that a jumper can be installed to limit the drive to SATA specs and a max 150mb/sec data transfer rate - if you don't install the jumper, the mboard will not be able to recognize the SATA 2 drive.
Some SATA 2 drives have that jumper position available (e.g. some current Samsung), some do not (e.g. some Maxtor).

Therefore, if you want to be sure the SATA drive will work for sure, get one that has the jumper position available.

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