Both of these are two different types of interfaces that connect other hardware to the computer motherboard. SATA is an acronym for Serial Advanced Technology Attachment. You might already know that SATA is more modern than IDEs. SATA cables offer much better data transfer speed than IDE cables. For comparison, the transfer speed of the average IDE cable is 33 MBps while a regular SATA cable can give a peak transfer rate of 1989 MBps. That is a 60-fold increase in data transfer speed. On top of that, SATA cables and connectors are smaller than IDEs. So, they do not take as much space.