I'm going to get a new computer. Should I get a serial ata hard drive which is a little more expensive and a s-ata cable and power cable or should I stick to ata-133. Is there really much of a performance increase. the hd is a maxtor diamond plus 9 120gb that I'm thinking of getting

ATA 133 is suppose to equal 133mb/sec transfer rates, and SATA is suppose to offer 150mb/sec transfer rates. Individual results do vary. Depending on File system used, hardware setup, the motherboard's IDE controller, disk density, seek time, etc... As far as I know. That is the only advantage SATA offers over ATA. I for one have not been able to justify the extra cost for the SATA drive over the ATA drives. I haven't compared them in a while. Hope this helps.

SATA or serial ATA is now at transfer speed of 150 but the promise of much faster transfer speeds is the draw. As with any new technology the price is higher than the old. When the technology matures it will undoubtedly become the defacto standard.

I suppose for now i'll stay with ata-133, i never do huge transfers of files that I have little time for and anyway i don't think it'll be that much slower. Next hard disk after that will be s-ata.

Yeah, most disks can only physically transfer data about 60MB/sec anyway, so there is no real need for Serial ATA yet until drives become faster mechanically. I suppose the only benefit of Serial ATA is those nice little cables. And Serial ATA drives use slightly less power than Parellel ATA ones. James