Below is a short glossary of technical terms to help you identify your drive
IDE
Most harddrive manufactured since the early 90s have been IDE format. The first IDE drives were made by Western Digital in 1986. IDE drives have 40 pin data connectors and 4 pin power cables (pictured).
PATA or ATA
IDE is one species of ATA (AT Attachment). In the last few years regular ATA drives have been referred to as PATA or Parallel ATA in order to differentiate them from newer Serial ATA (SATA) drives.
SATA
In the last few years Serial ATA (SATA) drives have become commonplace. Due to its serial architecture, SATA can achive higher data transfer rates than older IDE/PATA drives. The maxiumum transfer rate on SATA I drives is 1.5Gb/s, compared to 1.064Gb/s on ATA-133 drives. SATA II can reach 3Gb/s.
The 7 pin connector (left) is the data connection. The 14 pin connector (right) supplies the power.
SCSI
Pronounced "Scuzzy", SCSI drives are usually only found in servers and work station PCs. Interfaces are either 50 pin, 68 pin or 80 pin.
FAT or FAT32
FAT was the Microsoft standard file system architecture until it was superceded by NTFS. All Microsoft products from MS-DOS upto Windows Vista support FAT. Apple Macs can also read and write to FAT formatted drives.
NTFS
NTFS was introduced by Microsoft in Windows NT4, and became the standard file structure for Windows XP. NTFS has a number of advantages over FAT such as improved performance, reliability, and disk space utilization. Apple Macs can read NTFS formatted drives, but they cannot write to them.
HFS/HFS+
HFS+ is the standard file structure for Mac OS X disks, although Macs can read FAT and NTFS drives, and write to FAT drives. Windows cannot read HFS drives without 3rd party software.
Partition
For a disk to hold data it must be formatted and contain at least one data structure known as a partition. Disks with multiple partitions usually appear as separate disks in the operating system. If the partition is destroyed the data may still be readable by our recovery software and the partition can be rebuilt.
Boot Sector
This sector contains basic information which allows the computer to boot up and start the operating system. If this portion of the disk is damaged the computer may fail to boot. Some viruses attempt to destroy the boot sector in order to render the computer unusable. Unless there is sustained physical damage through out the disk, the data on the drive can usually be extracted before the original is reformatted and repopulated with data.