Pata has been superseded by Sata in 2003 and every modern computer utilizes this technology to save costs on cable production and to speed up the hard disk drive. Sata cables consist of 7 copper wire while Pata ribbon cables are made of 80, which theoretically makes the manufacture process for the new cables 10 times cheaper.
Laptops usually have one HDD with the really rare exception of gamer notebooks and industrial desktop replacement notebooks. These notebooks are made with most possible power in mind, portability was secondary so an extra HDD for Raid 0 or 1 setups are often added for more speed at retrieval of data.
A laptop hard drive is the main data storage unit in a laptop computer. There are different types of hard disks in notebooks but there are two main aspects we can use to group them. By connector type there are two notable variations, PATA and SATA. SATA uses a serial method for data transfer between the hard disk and the motherboard. This is the fastest way to connect a laptop HDD to the laptop motherboard. Data transfer rates can be as fast as 3 Gb/second whereas maximum transfer rate for PATA may only be 166MB/sec.
Many notebooks use slower 4200 or 5400 rounds per minute hard disks for their lower power consumption and smaller weight, but premium notebooks go for 7200 rpm disks for unmatched performance during everyday file tasks. If battery life is not taken into consideration 7200rpm devices are superior to their slower counterparts in every aspect possible, however should battery life be important, the lower consumption resulting from less power needed for spinning the disks at less revolution is a real asset.
There is another type of laptop storage device, and it’s the SSD. Solid State Disks are made of memory chips and are better in almost everything than HDDs, their only drawback is their massive cost per gigabyte. An SSD finds a sector a magnitude faster than a HDD, read and write speeds are also impressive, however as long as a 128gb SSD costs $350 I don’t see the throne of HDD threatened.