SATA vs PATA, Cloning a hard drive

[someone]

Generally speaking, which is faster - SATA hard drives or PATA hard drives?
(Both internal).
What is the best way to clone the system hard drive? I have previously used
an XCOPY command and the Recovery Console, but this is too tedious. I was
thinking of using a trial edition of Norton Ghost or something to create a
full backup of the drive, then restore the backup on the new drive.
Lastly, I was wondering is it better to have a larger hard drive for
programs and the smaller for Windows or vice versa? I want Windows to start
up and run as fast as possible.

Thanks

 

[DL]

Personally I use True Image, a trial is available.
Generally a sata drive has better performance, & is probably fairly future
proof, however I'm sure you are aware performance depends on a whole number
of things - windows startup depends on many things and should'nt really be
of concern

 

[Bob Willard]

Generally speaking, which is faster - SATA hard drives or PATA hard drives?
(Both internal).

A toss-up right now. Faster means, primarily, seek time and STR. Seek time
(and its companion, access time) is totally independent of the SATA or PATA
connection. STR (Sustained Transfer Rate) could be constrained by the datarate
of the connection, but -- for currently shipping HDs -- neither SATA nor PATA
(at its highest spec'ed rate) is a bottleneck.

There are reasons why SATA is better than PATA, but speed is not one.

 

[someone]

Personally I use True Image, a trial is available.
Generally a sata drive has better performance, & is probably fairly future
proof, however I'm sure you are aware performance depends on a whole number
of things - windows startup depends on many things and should'nt really be
of concern

Yes, I am aware performance is based on a number of things. The hard drive
was the only thing we hadn't "upgraded" yet.

I was forced to get SATA anyway cause all the PATA connections are full.

Thanks for the help.