SATA stands for Serial ATA. ATA (or PATA) is short for Parallel ATA. PATA is what CD/DVD drives use (with the IDE cords). It is called Parallel because 2 devices can be using it at one time. Unfortunally, wikipedia seems to be better at this then me. SATA: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sata PATA: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parallel_ATA
